John Hagelin is a particle physicist and director of the Transcendental Meditation movement for the United States. When he was still a serious physicist, he was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (1981–1982) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) (1982–1983).

Hagelin is now Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management (MUM). In recent years, his research has focused on connecting consciousness and the unified field theory. His ideas are considered fringe by the physics community and by cognitive scientists.

Despite this (or maybe because of this), he is widely cited by those who believe consciousness is primary to the existence of the universe, a position I have often criticized here. For example, he was featured in two of the most popular New Age "woo" movies, What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret - the first an example of how failing to understand science allows one to make all kinds of silly claims (as well as being a front for JZ Knight's Ramtha nonsense), and the second an example of how materialism and narcissism can be made to appear spiritual.

This summary is from Wikipedia:

Efforts to link consciousness to the unified field

Hagelin has attempted to combine his two area of expertise, linking Transcendental Meditation's view of consciousness with physical cosmology. Science writer Chris Andersen, Dallas Observer political reporter Jonathan Fox and physicist Peter Woit have written critically about Hagelin's research and publications in this area.[14][16][20]

In a 1992 news article for Nature about Hagelin's first presidential campaign, Anderson wrote that Hagelin, was "by all accounts a gifted researcher well known and respected by his colleagues" but that his effort to link grand unified theories of physics to Transcendental Meditation "infuriates his former collaborators."[20] He cited physicist John Ellis' fear that "people might regard [Hagelin's assertions] as rather flaky, and that might rub off on the theory or on us."[20] Fox observed that, while "once considered a top scientist, Hagelin's former academic peers ostracized him after the candidate attempted to shoehorn Eastern metaphysical musings into the realm of quantum physics."[16] In his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law, Woit acknowledged that Hagelin had published papers in prestigious journals that would eventually be cited in over a hundred other papers, but that identification of a unified field of consciousness with a unified field of superstring theory was wishful thinking and that most physicists thought Hagelin's views on this topic were nonsense.[14]

Hagelin's linkage of quantum mechanics and unified field theory with consciousness was also critiqued by University of Iowa philosophy and sociology professors Evan Fales and Barry Markovsky in 1997, in the journal Social Forces. They wrote that the connection relied on similarity between properties of quantum mechanical fields and consciousness, but that the parallels Hagelin highlighted between unified field theories and the Vedas rested on ambiguity, obscurity and vague analogy supported by the construction of arbitrary similarities.[26]

Hagelin was featured in the movies What the Bleep Do We Know!?,[27] and The Secret.[28] What the Bleep Do We Know? was described by Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, as being filled with "New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as 'quantum flapdoodle.'"[29]

In a sense, it's sad that Hagelin is where he is now. Prior to leaving the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1983, he had authored a couple a very highly cited papers in particle physics. One wonders what may have been possible if he had not gone off into the wilderness.

This talk was given at Stanford University, interestingly enough.

John Hagelin - Consciousness, a Quantum Physics Perspective

Published on Aug 1, 2014


Renowned quantum physicist, John Hagelin (PhD, Harvard), presents the thesis that consciousness is a unified field that contains nature's programming code and transcending through meditation is a pathway to hack / access consciousness.

The Drunken, Racist, Homophobic Fall of J.Z. Knight (or is it Ramtha?)

Several years ago, maybe almost a decade now, a few of J.Z. Knight's followers made a film called What the Bleep Do We Know? In a sense, that film mainstreamed Knight and her channeled deity, Ramtha, the Enlightened One, a supposed 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior. By including her "channeled" perspectives alongside those of physicists, philosophers, and consciousness researchers, they tried to lend credibility to cult leader and her alter ego.

A couple of years ago, however, any tolerance most people held for this seemingly harmless cult was erased by a series of videos in which Knight rambled drunken racist, homophobic, and just plain ignorant rants during "teachings" in which all the audience members were required to drink each time Knight/Ramtha drank.

“JZ Knight shrieks abuse and ridicule at her followers, and hate speech against Catholics, Jews, gays, and others — all welcomed with audience cheers,” Melissa Genson wrote in one of a series of critical articles on RSE for the South Thurston Journal.

Knight has always been sketchy in my opinion, but other than bilking her followers of their money, she seemed relatively harmless, or at least her public image seemed harmless.

Not any more.

Ramtha, New Age Cult Leader, Unleashes Drunken, Racist, Homophobic Rants to Large Following

She "channels" a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior.

July 9, 2014 | Southern Poverty Law Center / By Susy Buchanan


RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT - Photo Credit: RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT
YELM, Wash. — It’s March 2011 at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE) in this rapidly growing town just outside of Olympia. Hundreds of truth seekers pack into a converted horse arena to hear a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior speak the wisdom of the ages. The crowd is yearning for super-consciousness and enlightenment; what they get is drunken ramblings peppered with curse words. There’s no Kool-Aid served, just red wine, bottles and bottles of it. Wine ceremonies, which have been going on at RSE since 1996, are significant because students believe wine grapes were brought to Earth by extraterrestrials 450,000 years ago.

The blonde on stage is J.Z. (for Judith Zebra) Knight, a 65-year-old former rodeo queen and cable TV saleswoman. The words coming from her mouth aren’t hers, the assembled crowd believes, but rather those of the ethereal being she channels, Ramtha the Enlightened One. Knight goes back and forth between herself and the supposedly channeled Ramtha.

During the 16 or so hours the students spend in a spiritual drinking game (students must drink every time Ramtha/Knight does), Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews.

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

These are not the kind of cosmic revelations that have drawn students to Knight for 38 years. For the most part, RSE students are thoughtful and well-educated, not apt to embrace a bigoted guru. For decades, the message had been more about finding the god within than disparaging minorities, and the blend of science and New Age Gnosticism made J.Z. Knight millions well before the drunken homophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic racist rants began to make their way into her preachings.

What happened at RSE would have stayed at RSE had it not been for the Internet. In 2012, livestreamed videos of Ramtha’s hate speech were posted to the Web, first by ex-students Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, then by a libertarian-leaning think tank called the Freedom Foundation that is based in Olympia. The excerpts from that wine ceremony left Thurston County residents shocked and wondering if there was a more sinister side to their kooky neighborhood cult.

Was there a hate group lurking in “The Pride of the Prairie,” as Yelm calls itself? Knight blamed Coverdale, who had slept with Knight’s boyfriend, as a spurned lover, and the libertarian-leaning think tank, the Freedom Foundation, as politically motivated.

But the scandal caused by the videos embarrassed Democratic candidates who had taken a total of $70,000 in campaign donations from Knight. “I am appalled by Ms. Knight’s outrageous anti-Mexican, anti-Catholic raging,” said Thurston County (Wash.) Commissioner Sandra Romero. “These vile, racist, and divisive comments against responsible and caring people have no place in Thurston County, or anywhere else.” Romero ended up giving Knight’s donation to nonprofits benefitting Latinos.

Through it all, Knight has ignored requests for a retraction and maintained that the videos were maliciously edited and taken out of context.

Melissa and Steve Genson, farmers and restaurateurs who also operate an online newspaper, were equally outraged, and Melissa, a CPA and fraud investigator by training, began an intense investigation into activities at RSE. “JZ Knight shrieks abuse and ridicule at her followers, and hate speech against Catholics, Jews, gays, and others — all welcomed with audience cheers,” Melissa wrote in one of a series of critical articles on RSE for the South Thurston Journal.

Raising Ramtha

J.Z. Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in 1946 in Roswell, N.M., one of eight children in a family of migrant farm workers. In her autobiography, 1987’s A State of Mind: My Story, she says a Yaqui Indian woman told her mother that baby Judith would one day see what no one else could. In 1977, that prediction came true, as Knight tells it. She and her first husband heard about “Pyramid Power” — the belief that pyramids modeled on those in Egypt could sharpen razor blades and preserve food through mummification — and spent a rather manic weekend constructing paper pyramids and placing various objects (cheese, dog food) inside.

“My kitchen was looking more like a wholesale warehouse than a kitchen, but it was worth it,” Knight wrote. “We retired at three a.m., exhausted.”

The following day, Knight jokingly grabbed one of the paper pyramids, placed it on her head, and Ramtha, a seven-foot-tall apparition of golden glitter clad in a purple robe, appeared in her kitchen. “I am Ramtha the Enlightened One. I have come to help you over the ditch,” she says he told her, and shortly thereafter Knight was in business.

She began channeling Ramtha in public in 1979, presenting his wisdom nationally and internationally through workshops and retreats called “Ramtha Dialogues.” Early students included Shirley MacLaine (who broke off contact with Knight 30 years ago, a spokesman for the actress and author said), and, RSE officials say, actors Richard Chamberlain and Mike Farrell. Actress Salma Hayek and former “Dynasty” star Linda Evans are current students, they add.


Based in Yelm, Wash., J.Z. Knight has spent the years since 1979 travelling the globe and channeling “Ramtha the Enlightened One.” It has made her a millionaire. Photo Credit: RAMTHA SCHOOL OF ENLIGHTENMENT
That same year, she purchased an 80-acre ranch in Yelm, where she would breed Arabian horses for a time, build herself a 12,800-square-foot chateau, subsequently sell the horses, remodel the 15,000-square-foot horse arena, and open what would become RSE in 1989.

The location has significance that goes beyond cheap land. The region, according to RSE, was actually part of ancient Lemuria during Ramtha’s lifetime, before he migrated to Atlantis and freed his people from tyranny at the age of 14, then went on to conquer two-thirds of the world at the head of an army of 2.5 million. After being run through with a sword during battle, Ramtha sat on a rock and meditated for seven years, became enlightened, taught his body to vibrate at a high frequency and ascended, like Jesus, RSE’s website explains.

“Since the school was founded in 1989, more than 86,000 people worldwide have attended RSE events including about 7,500 in Washington State,” Knight’s Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based PR firm told the Intelligence Report. About 2,000 students live near Yelm, which has a total population of close to 7,000. The students are drawn in by the four tenets of Ramtha’s philosophy: the statement, ‘You are god’; the mandate to make known the unknown; the concept that consciousness and energy create the nature of reality; the challenge to conquer yourself.

The Nazis Cheer

But Knight also teaches students to be sovereign, to hoard gold and prepare food and supplies to survive for two years after one of the natural disasters that she often predicts will hit the earth. Knight as Ramtha is also quoted on the neo-Nazi Web forum Stormfront, where her writings on the “New World Order” are much appreciated and quoted under headings such as “Jews were responsible for causing WW1 & 2.”

“It took a lot to get this country into the First World War, because no one wanted to get into it. And so the Graymen, owning most of the media ... do you know what the media is? I have learned that term!” wrote “Ramtha” in 1999’s Ramtha: The White Book (which also carries an introduction by Knight). “The Graymen own them all; you know, the papers you read, the box you watch, the magazines you thumb through, the radio waves you listen to.”

In 2004, RSE students produced an infomercial for the school disguised as a documentary called “What the Bleep do we Know!?” The film grossed $10 million in the United States but was panned by critics. “New Age hooey disguised as a scientific documentary about quantum physics,” is how Jack Garner of the Rochester [N.Y.] Democrat and Chronicle summed it up.

Appearing in the film is Irishman Míceál Ledwith, a former monsignor in the Catholic Church, adviser to the pope, and president at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, an Irish seminary dating back to 1518.

Ledwith resigned abruptly in 1994 after allegations of pedophilia, which were later settled out of court, and was defrocked by the Vatican in 2005.

Ledwith, who is part of Knight’s inner circle and has been a student at RSE since 1989, can be seen in the full-length, 16-hour video of the 2011 wine ceremony, where he takes the stage with Knight about seven hours in, propping himself up on Ramtha’s ornate throne.

“Fuck Jehovah,” Knight proclaims, speaking in Ramtha’s voice and outing Jesus as a fellow alien who came to this planet to basically teach the same things. From the same stage, Ledwith denounces the biblical God as “fickle, capricious, psychotic, neurotic, and insecure, and we are supposed to believe that he is the creator God.” Knight adds that God is a “psychotic, insecure son of a bitch,” which draws a chuckle from the former priest. Then they dance.

Of Orbs and Soap Bubbles

Promoting Ramtha is serious business. Knight oversees 80 employees. In the past, students have paid $1,000 or more to participate in events where crowds often reached a thousand people or more. The school currently holds about 50 events a year, has published more than 600 books, CDs and videos, and has material translated into 18 languages.

Knight is fiercely protective of her kingdom. When a woman in Berlin, Germany, Judith Ravell, claimed that she was also channeling Ramtha, Knight took her to court and won the copyright to Ramtha’s teachings. Later, after another woman, Whitewind Weaver, who had attended a dozen events at RSE, imparted Ramtha’s teachings in an event of her own, Knight sued her as well, and was awarded $10,000 in 2008.

Currently, Knight is involved in legal action against those who released the hate-filled video clips to the Internet in 2012. The efforts of both Coverdale of Yelm and McCarthy of New Zealand to expose the darker side of the Enlightened One have landed them in a courtroom facing Knight. They are supported by a growing online community of ex-RSE students critical of Knight, who they describe as a dangerous cult leader. Coverdale is appealing a $600,000 judgment against her for releasing the videos, while McCarthy has a court date in May.

“The whole idea of Ramtha seemed absolute nonsense. But the RSE students I met were idealistic, intelligent, well educated and very caring, hardly the sort cult members typify, and besides I could just walk away anytime. I was convinced to just give it a try,” says McCarthy, who left the school in 1995 after seven years.

“Most people who attend the RSE flowery love bomb introductory events will be drawn in by very appealing concepts and promises. The promoters will appear smart, happy and very supportive. Nothing like typical cult behavior and recruitment techniques would be recognizable,” he adds. “The trap is set by J.Z. Knight, and those attending are clueless to the cult persuasion techniques they could fall prey to.”

It’s early March 2014, and about 30 students have come to Yelm for a “Beginner’s Event” at a cost of $450 apiece. They’ve brought sleeping bags and pillows, and are sprawled out on the floor waiting for instruction. It begins, as always, with a blast of upbeat pop music, which means the students are to assemble and dance. The schedule is rigorous, from dawn until well past dusk. Most of them sleep in the arena or camp on the compound. There are live lectures from some of the seven RSE teachers anointed by Knight, video lessons from Knight, and a number of spiritual exercises designed to expand the mind.

The music builds to a crescendo as students sit in the lotus position doing “C&E,” a meditative breathing technique which involves clenching the buttocks and thighs followed by forced breaths that make the arena sound like a pit of snakes all hissing in unison. Some students tremble and shout with ecstasy. After about 15 minutes, they don their rubber boots and rain jackets, collect two different cards with drawings of objects or concepts they covet, and proceed to a two-acre fenced paddock. They pin their cards to various places around the paddock, don their blindfolds, spin around and then attempt to find their own cards using only their minds to guide them.

The previous evening, the small class of initiates was joined by an international crowd of around 400 local students — including many young children — who filled the arena, dancing together with joyful abandon as the music throbbed at what was undoubtedly the most happening night spot in the entire county.

During the five-day retreat they’ll learn about orbs, that cabbages scream when you cut them, that the spirit looks like a soap bubble, and that Ramtha has the ability to conjure up spirits such as “Mothman” (along with photographic proof).

They’ll see photos of grinning “ramsters,” as the townies call them, holding up checks for various amounts from Ramtha-inspired wins in the lottery or at the nearby casino, and be lectured on quantum physics. There’s not a whisper of hate, Ramtha is not in attendance (although staff tell students he is always here), and toasts are made with water glasses.


Several times a year, up to 1,000 students flock to the 80-acre Ramtha School of Enlightenment, where they live in tents and receive doses of cosmic wisdom they believe are imparted by an ancient “Lemurian warrior.” Photo Credit: JEFF ADAMS
Satire or Simply Slurs?

To this day, there have been no apologies or retractions of the hate speech that has caused RSE such embarrassment. One is not needed, her defenders insist, pointing out that Knight employs lapsed Catholics, former Jews, a lesbian and a Mexican-born man as part of her inner circle. They say her remarks were taken out of context, invoking the example of satirist Steven Colbert telling his audience that the poor should be euthanized. One RSE teacher, Jaime Leal-Anaya, Mexican by birth, explains that Jesus was also taken out of context in the early days of Christianity, and that people mistook his followers for cannibals when Jesus told them to eat of his body, and drink of his blood.

Knight herself consents to answer questions by telephone on day four of the Beginner’s Event. Although she’s at home in the mansion next door, a recent channeling session in Mexico and the death of a beloved pet have left her bedridden.

Unlike her staff, Knight maintains that the offending videos were heavily edited. “We have a very sophisticated videography streaming department. We know what edited looks like,” she says, claiming she would never go through a “multimillion dollar lawsuit” if there were any truth to the clips. Her litigiousness, she explains, stems from trying to protect her business and company secrets. “We are a revered school around the world, I was part of the president’s re-election committee, we are proactive in education, and this is not who we are.”

Knight dismisses Coverdale as a woman who “couldn’t keep the man she was after for more than three weeks and hated me for it for the rest of her life. I never had a conversation with her. She’s somebody who wants to be famous and is a very jealous and envious, controlling person that thought they could make some money off of me,” she claims. “People who say those things, we are taught by the Ram, are really speaking about themselves, it’s the Jung concept of the shadow.”

Knight vehemently objects to her school being labeled as a cult, which she considers another four-letter word. She says she’s tired after 38 years of channeling Ramtha, and plans to retire from the business side of things and write books.

By all appearances, that doesn’t mean she’s planning to go easy on Coverdale and McCarthy. “Those tapes were illegal from the get-go, and that they were distributed, edited and chopped to make us look like bigots and hateful people when nothing could be further from the truth, nothing!” she charges. “I will not let other people rewrite our history!”

Coverdale, for her part, is not backing down. “Although admittedly, as a rule, the cult does not have as one of its ideologies hating Mexicans or Jewish people or gay people or Catholics, J.Z. Knight herself is proving she does as her [drinking] increases and she is unable to keep up the love act she had going in the ’80s. It is beyond hate speech,” Coverdale says.

“In America, there are many First Amendment rights I agree with, even if I disagree with what is being said. Where I get concerned is when you have a large group of people that believe they are hearing from a powerful enlightened entity, creating an ‘us versus them’ situation.”

Kathryn Schulz - The Self in Self-Help

From New York Magazine's's special issue on self-help, this is a very interesting article on the challenges of trying to help a self that most neuroscientists (and Buddhists) do not even believe to be real.

Schulz looks at the literature of self-help as well as the philosophical tradition up through the present in her attempt to identify what this self is that so many of us are trying to help.

The Self in Self-Help

We have no idea what a self is. So how can we fix it?

By Kathryn Schulz
Published Jan 6, 2013

Alex Prager (Photo: Asger Carlsen/CASEY)

In The Age of Anxiety, W.H. Auden observed that we human beings never become something without pretending to be it first. The corollary is more prosaic but, regrettably, at least as true: We humans never become most of the things we pretend we will someday be. Nevertheless, last Monday, you and I and several billion other incorrigible optimists raised our glasses and toasted all the ways we will be different in 2013.

It’s easy to understand why we want to be different. We are twenty pounds overweight; we are $20,000 in debt; we can’t believe we slept with that guy; we can’t believe we didn’t. What’s harder to understand is why transforming ourselves is so difficult. Changing other people is notoriously hard; the prevailing wisdom on that one is Don’t hold your breath. But it’s not obvious why changing oneself should present any difficulty at all. And yet, demonstrably, it does.

The noted self-help guru Saint Augustine identified this problem back in the fourth century A.D. In his Confessions, he records an observation: “The mind gives an order to the body and is at once obeyed, but when it gives an order to itself, it is resisted.” I cannot improve upon Augustine’s insight, but I can update his examples. Say you want to be skinny. You’ve signed on with Weight Watchers, taken up Zumba, read everything from Michael Pollan to French Women Don’t Get Fat, and scrupulously recorded your every workout, footstep, and calorie on your iPhone. So whence the impulsive Oreo binge? Or say you are a self-identified co-dependent. You know your Melody ­Beattie, listen to your therapist, and tell yourself every morning, quite firmly, just what you will and will not do that night. So what are you doing back in bed with that man? Or say you are a professional writer who values being conscientious, respects her editors, and passionately believes that good writing requires time. So—well, let’s drop the pretense. Why am I sitting here typing this at 4 a.m., two days past deadline?

I don’t know, but misery loves company, and such acts of auto-insubordination happen all the time. They go some way toward explaining the popularity of the self-help movement, since clearly we need help, but they also reveal a fundamental paradox at its heart. How can I want to achieve a goal so badly that I will expend considerable time, energy, and money trying to reach it while simultaneously needing to be coaxed, bribed, tricked, and punished into a compliance that is inconsistent at best?

This is where the cheerfully practical and accessible domain of self-help bumps up against one of the thorniest problems in all of science and philosophy. In the 1,600 years since Augustine left behind selfhood for sainthood, we’ve made very little empirical progress toward understanding our own inner workings. We have, however, developed an $11 billion industry dedicated to telling us how to improve our lives. Put those two facts together and you get a vexing question: Can self-help work if we have no idea how a self works?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I know people who wouldn’t so much as walk through the self-help section of a bookstore without The Paris Review under one arm and a puzzled oh-I-thought-the-bathroom-was-over-here look on their face. I understand where they’re coming from, since some of the genre’s most persistent pitfalls—charlatanism, cheerleading, bad science, silver bullets, New Age hoo-ha—are my own personal peanut allergies: deadly even in tiny ­doses. And yet I don’t share the contempt for self-help, not least because I have sought succor there myself. The first time was for writer’s block—which is, I realize, a rarefied little issue, sort of the artisanal pickle of personal problems. (I got over it: QED.) The second time was for its very nasty older brother, depression—of which more anon. In both cases, I ventured into the self-help section for the usual reason: the help. Last month, though, I went back to investigate the other half of the equation: the self.

If, like me, you have read your way through sober Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and godly Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), through exuberant Tony Robbins (Unleash the Power Within) and ridiculous Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), through John Gray who Is From Mars and Timothy Ferriss who has a four-hour everything and Deepak Chopra who at this point really is one with the universe (65 books and counting)—anyway, if you, too, have reckoned with the size and scope of the self-help movement, you probably share my initial intuition about what it has to say about the self: lots. It turns out, though, that all that surface noise is deceptive. Underneath what appears to be umptebajillion ideas about who we are and how we work, the self-help movement has a startling paucity of theories about the self. To be precise: It has one.

Let us call it the master theory of self-help. It goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you. In other words, this master theory is fundamentally dualist. It posits, at a minimum, two selves: one that needs a kick in the ass and one that is capable of kicking.

This model of selfhood is intuitively appealing, not least because it describes an all-too-familiar experience. As I began by saying, all of us struggle to keep faith with our plans and goals, and all of us can envision better selves more readily than we can be them. Indeed, the reason we go to the self-help section in the first place is that some part of us wants to do something that some other part resists.

Of course, intuitive appeal is a poor indicator of the merits of a model; the geocentric universe is intuitively appealing, too. But even though this master theory of self-help is coarse, misleading, none too useful, and probably just plain wrong, it does capture something crucial about the experience of being human. One of the strange and possibly unique facts about our species is that we really can intervene on ourselves. Get a lab rat addicted to alcohol and you will have yourself an addicted rat. Get a teenager addicted to alcohol and eventually you might find yourself celebrating his 30th year of sobriety. It isn’t consistent, it isn’t predictable, and God knows it isn’t easy—and yet somehow, sometimes, we do manage to change. The self really can help itself. The question is: How?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Master theories—of self-help or anything else—don’t really answer questions like that. Instead, they dictate the shape an answer must take. Consider, for example, the way language works. En­glish is a subject-verb-object language, meaning that the sentences we produce must all conform to that grammatical pattern. Within that constraint, however, the number of sentences we can generate is infinite: “We have not yet begun to fight.” “A screaming came across the sky.” “I’m intercontinental when I eat French toast.” The master rule controls the form, but it’s completely agnostic about the content.

So too with the master theory of self-help: It mandates a conflict between two parts of the self, but beyond that, it makes no particular demands and answers no particular questions. Who is divided against whom, who has the power and who is powerless, how to ensure that the “right” part of yourself winds up in charge: All this is up for grabs. Accordingly, self-help strategies distinguish themselves from one another—and pledge to solve your problems—by carving up the self at different joints: a mind and a brain, a consciousness and an unconscious, an evolved self and a primitive self—you get the picture. Such distinctions inevitably reflect different beliefs about what kind of creatures we are and often reflect different beliefs about our place in the universe. That makes them philosophically interesting—but, alas, it does not make them particularly useful.

To see why not, consider two examples. In self-help programs that draw on religious or spiritual practices, the locus of control is largely externalized; the real power belongs to God (or a supreme being, a universal consciousness—whatever you care to call it). But these programs also posit a part of the self that is receptive to or one with that external force: an internal fragment of the divine that can triumph over human weakness.

This is pretty much the oldest kind of dualism in the book: your sacred soul against your mortal flesh. You can see it at work in 12-step programs, where addicts begin by admitting they are powerless to control their addiction and then make “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.” But think about that for a moment: How do recovering addicts simultaneously exercise and abdicate their right to make decisions? How do they choose to let a higher power do the choosing—not just once but every time temptation comes along? Twelve-step programs are reputed to be one of the more effective ways to treat addiction, yet how their followers pull off this sleight-of-self remains a mystery.

Now consider what seems, at first, like a completely different model of selfhood. “Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure,” Tony Robbins writes in Awaken the Giant Within. Robbins’s vision of the self is Skinnerian rather than spiritual: We are conditioned, like dogs to a whistle or unluckier dogs to a kick, to certain habits of thought and action. How, then, are we supposed to change? “The most effective way,” he tells us, is to “get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief.”

Well, wait a second: Who is the “you” who gets “your brain” to rewire, and how does it do so? Through “the power of decision,” Robbins says, which “gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.” But if we are creatures of conditioning, how did this one part of ourselves remain independent? Where did it hide while we were being conditioned, and how will it emerge, and by what mechanism will it make decisions for the rest of us?

You see the problem. The self-help movement seeks to account for and overcome the difficulties we experience when we are trying to make a desired change—but doing so by invoking an immortal soul and a mortal sinner (or an ego and an id, a homunculus and its minion) is not much different from saying that we “are of two minds,” or “feel torn,” or for that matter that we have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. These are not explanations for the self. They are metaphors for the self. And metaphors, while evocative and illuminating, do not provide concrete causal explanations. Accordingly, they are not terribly likely to generate concrete solutions. True, self-help literature is full of good advice, but good advice is not the issue; most of it has been around for centuries. The issue is how to implement it. In the words of the emphasis-happy Robbins, “Lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what theyknow.”

When it comes to solving that problem—which is the problem—all self-help literature offers is a kind of metaphysical power of attorney for our putative better halves. But if you identify with the above-mentioned Oreo-eater or healthy-­relationship saboteur or procrastinator, you yourself are evidence that this is a nonsolution. If giving your better half executive control by fiat could change your life, sales of self-help material would plummet overnight. It is a somewhat beautiful fact that the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry’s existence.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But, in the spirit of being a better person, I should not be so hard on self-help. The fact is, selves are profoundly difficult to understand. “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience,” the contemporary philosopher David Chalmers observes, “but there is nothing that is harder to explain.”

Part of why we can’t explain the self is that we can’t even find it. Here’s William James, an exceptionally acute internal observer, giving it a try. “My present Me is felt with warmth and intimacy,” he wrote in Psychology: Briefer Course.“The heavy warm mass of my body is there, and the nucleus of the ‘spiritual me,’ the sense of intimate activity is there. We cannot realize our present self without simultaneously feeling one or other of these two things.” That was as close as James ever got to figuring out how to find a self: on the basis of a warm fuzzy feeling, emphasis on fuzzy.

David Hume, meanwhile, couldn’t find himself at all. “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” If there was an essential “I” beneath all that, Hume couldn’t find it. Ultimately, he proposed that it doesn’t exist—that we are not sum, only parts: “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.” That idea poses a major problem for the master theory of self-help, with its internal governor, its you ex machina.Apparently, self-help has assigned the lead part in our show to an actor who is nowhere to be found.

Nor has science made much progress in locating the self, let alone explaining it. These days, most people who study the mind believe that our sense of having an “I” somehow arises from cognitive processes like the ones Hume described. That rules out Descartes’s theory that our inner essence was rooted in the pineal gland, but it still leaves us intellectual light-years from anything like a fully developed scientific theory of the self. To put the problem in perspective, consider that, three centuries after Isaac Newton pioneered the study of optics, vision scientists are just starting to understand how our brain handles the problem of recognizing faces. Those discoveries are interesting and admirable on their own merits. But it is a very long way—probably many more centuries—from understanding how the mind sees faces to understanding how the mind sees itself. In the meantime, perhaps we should start looking beyond the constraints of the master theory of self—and, indeed, beyond the self entirely—for ways to improve our lives.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The expression “self-help” comes from a book of that name, published in 1859 by the great-grandfather of the modern movement, one Samuel Smiles. (I kid you not.) These days, the phrase is so commonplace that we no longer hear the ideology implicit in it. But there is one: We are here to help ourselves, not to get help from others nor lend it to them. Unlike his contemporary Charles Dickens, Smiles was unmoved by appalling social conditions; on the contrary, he regarded them as a convenient whetstone on which to hone one’s character. As a corollary, he did not believe that altering the structure of society would improve anyone’s lot. “No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober,” he wrote. “Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-­denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.”

Smiles was Scottish, but it makes sense that his ideas received their most enthusiastic and enduring reception in the United States: a nation founded on faith in self-governance, belief in the physics-defying power of bootstraps, and the cheery but historically anomalous conviction that we all have the right to try to be happy. But this now-ubiquitous model of self-help might do an injustice to both the source of our problems and their potential solutions. We are social creatures, and we function (and dysfunction) in context. All of us know that we are notably different from one environment (Grandma’s assisted-living facility) to the next (Pyramid Club, East Village, 3 a.m.). What none of us knows is who we would be—or could be—if our context were altered in crucial ways at critical times. It’s entirely possible that socioeconomic background and current community exert a more powerful influence over us than our ostensibly independent inner selves. In that case, the best self-improvement effort would be to better society.

The larger point is this: God knows we all need more help, but possibly we need less self. That has long been the political response to the self-help movement, and it is also, in a different sense, what Buddhists believe. Curiously, Buddhism is simultaneously a burgeoning influence on the Western self-help movement and entirely at odds with it: anti-self, and anti-help. It is anti-help insofar as it emphasizes radical self-acceptance and also insofar as it emphasizes remaining in the present. (Improvement, needless to say, requires you to focus on the future.) It is anti-self in that it treats thoughts as passing ephemera rather than as the valuable products of a distinct and consistent mind. The journalist Josh Rothman once wrote a lovely description of what a cloud really is: not an entity, as we perceive it, but just a region of space that’s cooler than the regions around it, so that water vapor entering it condenses from the cold, then evaporates again as it drifts back out. A cloud is no more a thing, Rothman concluded, than “the pool of light a flashlight makes as you shine it around a dark room.” And the self, the Buddhists would say, is no more a thing than a region of air with thoughts passing through.

I’m not just mentioning these two anti-self self-improvement measures because they appeal to me, although they do. I mention them because, when it comes to helping ourselves (and, okay, also in some other areas), I believe in heterogeneity and promiscuity. Most of the time, when we want to solve a problem, we try to eliminate hypotheses until a single one remains standing: a theory, in the scientific sense. But there’s a case to be made that we should try to increase rather than decrease the available hypotheses about helping ourselves. I’ll make that case by way of conclusion and by way of making my own small and questionable contribution to the large and questionable body of self-help advice. And since this is after all an essay about selves, I will also make it, if you’ll forgive me, by getting momentarily personal.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I have no idea how I got over my depression. I spent a year doing the things one does: I read Feeling Good, went to therapy, got exercise, tried to eat well in the utter absence of appetite, and routinely forced myself into sympathetic company when every particle of my being—or, I suppose, every particle but one—wanted to curl up alone in the dark. I did all these things not out of any real hope that they would work but because the failure to do them seemed like it would cede more ground to the awfulness. And then some moon in my inner universe set silently, and the awfulness went out like a tide.

The self helps itself. I know it firsthand, as well as second- and third-hand, and so do you. But none of us—no matter what anyone says to the contrary—can tell you precisely how it happens. Maybe it was the therapy, in my case. Maybe it was the running. Maybe it was David D. Burns, M.D. Maybe it was two or three or all of the above in combination. Maybe it was some slight incident I didn’t even register at the time. Maybe it was time.

Or maybe we humans change the way species do: through random variation. If that’s the case, then the strategy we’ve arrived at out of necessity might be the best one anyone could design. Try something. Better still, try everything—throw all the options at the occluding wall of the self and see what sticks. Meditation, marathon training, fasting, freewriting, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, speed dating, volunteering, moving to Auckland, redecorating the living room: As long as you steer clear of self-harm and felony, you might as well do anything you can to your inner and outer ecosystems that might induce a beneficial mutation.

The good news is that, in my experience, this is what most of us do anyway. We sample profligately from the vast universe of hypotheses about how to improve our lives: We try organizing our desk according to David Allen, our abs according to Timothy Ferriss, our hearts according to the Buddha. We obey a command: Know thyself. And another: Forget thyself. It might not work. It might not even be how we work. But it does at least pay homage to the day-to-day, problem-to-problem, mood-to-mood complexity of being human.

The bad news is that even if you succeed with this approach, you will never truly know which specific tactic worked—even after the fact, let alone beforehand. In other words, as scientists would say, this method of self-help is an uncontrolled experiment. But so what? Life is an uncontrolled experiment: confounded, confounding, and, above all, completely impossible to replicate—tragically so, and wonderfully so. I try to remind myself of that as often as I can. Sometimes it helps.

A Critical History of Findhorn - Birth of the "New Age"

This interesting article comes from the November 5 issue of Swans, their special "New Age" edition with an interesting assortment of articles on the various contributing sources to what we now term the "New Age" movement. Several of these are cool articles, but I was struck by the one on the Findhorn community, one of the most influential intentional communities of the 1960s and 1970s. You can read the "official" history of Findhorn at their site.

Here are the contents of the New Age issue.

New Age Special Issue

Manuel García, Jr.: Asian Philosophies And The "New Age"
Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist philosophies that influenced the New Age.

Glenn Reed: Mildred I Presume?
Reflections on technology and its effect on social interactions.

Jason Colavito: Of Atlantis And Aliens
Discussion of how the myth of Atlantis and alien visitation are related to imperial historical narratives.

Jan Baughman: New Age Geriatrics
A cartoonish look at the commercialized New Age movement in its old age.

Michael Barker: New Age Flying Objects
An examination of the theosophical roots of UFOism, drawing upon David Clarke and Andy Roberts book, Flying Saucerers: A Social History of UFOlogy (Alternative Albion, 2007).

Michael Barker: Sir George Trevelyan's Life Of Magic
A review of Sir George Trevelyan (1906-1996) contribution to the New Age community.

Michael Barker: Findhorn's Angels
A critical history of the Findhorn Foundation, an eco-village based in Scotland.

Michael Barker: Paul Hawken's Spiritual Business
Exploration of Paul Hawken's spiritual proclivities vis-à-vis his love of capitalism.

Peter Byrne: Sounding Off Between New Age And Counterculture: Norman Mailer
A critical synthesis of Norman Mailer's literary output vis-à-vis the New Age.

Gilles d'Aymery: Old New Age
A look at the New Age movement through the now-defunct Foundation for Global Community.

* * * * *

Findhorn's Angels

 

by Michael Barker

"A born skeptic, I can appreciate that much of what you will read will seem implausible and incredible. I do not ask that you believe this account, for it is written only through one man's eyes. Every aspect of creation has as many realities as perceivers."
— Paul Hawken, 1975.

(Swans - November 5, 2012)   Paul Hawken is one of the world's leading proponents of green capitalism, having authored a number of books on this subject in recent decades, the most famous being Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Earthscan, 1999), which he coauthored with Amory and Hunter Lovins. What is less well known -- although far from secret -- is the topic of Hawken's first book, The Magic of Findhorn (Souvenir Press, 1975), which explored the role that angels can fulfill in revising humankind's destructive relationship with planet earth. This book accomplished this stunning feat by eulogizing the early history of the Scottish-based Findhorn Community, a group that presently describes itself as "a spiritual community, ecovillage and an international centre for holistic education, helping to unfold a new human consciousness and create a positive and sustainable future." 

Hawken recalls how he first came across Findhorn when he read an article in Harper's by occult author Peter Tompkins "describing a small group of people, isolated on a cold windblown peninsula in Scotland, who were growing one of the world's most fantastic gardens with no resources except bushels of love and contact with another dimension of consciousness called the Devic and Elemental Worlds." But despite the fact that "reports of 42-pound cabbages and 60-pound broccoli plants" made the Findhorn story "quite unbelievable," Hawken's interest was piqued as to how the founder of Findhorn, an ex-Royal Air Force squadron leader named Peter Caddy, had obtained such success in the windswept Scottish sand dunes when before starting the garden he hadn't as much as planted a seed. (1) However, Peter did not simply talk to angels to produce large vegetables but actually spent years consciously enriching the garden's nutrients with organic matter; likewise his initial bumper crops are comparable in size to those regularly attained by British gardeners in competitions (or perhaps those attained by his father who was a prize-winning gardener); (2) while the windswept gardens of Findhorn benefited enormously from the warm air generated by the local Gulf Stream currents, and midsummer days that are some twenty hours long. The area is sometimes referred to as the Scottish Riviera.

 

Peter sat "at the helm of a community with the aura of a corporate president," perhaps owing much to his years spent in the Royal Air Force; and as Hawken adds: "The one thing that Peter emphasized was Punctuality." Much like military doctrine -- unquestioning dedication to Findhorn is a prerequisite for success; critical thinkers and naysayers are a burden to efficient organizational maintenance. Positive thinking is thus key to Peter's "Law of Manifestation" -- positivity being so central that the word "if" apparently "atrophied from his vocabulary years ago" as the word represents negative thinking, which as far as Findhorn is concerned is "self-defeating, demoralizing, and useless." "Just four rules at Findhorn: no dope, no smoking in public areas, a rule can be made by Peter at any time, and no negative thinking!" So although Hawken credits Peter as being "inwardly... extremely sensitive and intensely motivated," outwardly he is "very much the ex-squadron leader barking out commands." (3)

Here it is useful to backtrack a little to understand how Peter came to work for angels. Hawken traces Peter's first occult experience to his childhood, when his father's search for a cure to the crippling "pain of rheumatoid arthritis" led Frederick Caddy to the...

...mysterious medicine of Lucille Rutterby, a "spiritual healer" gifted with the ability to contact those on the "other side" and seek their help. Her husband, Plato Rutterby, joined her and the Caddys in a circle of friends, meeting once a week to channel and transmit the messages of the great Silver Deer, a former North American Indian chief who soared weekdays among the Celestial Ones and descended on Friday nights to the Earth Plane into this jaunty woman in her thirties who resembled a fresh boiled dumpling in woollies. (p.43)

Rutterby's unorthodox approach to healing, however, proved unsuccessful, and when Peter's father -- who despite his occult forays was a "staunch Methodist" -- went back to his family doctor he was diagnosed as suffering from kidney stones, which were promptly remedied by conventional means, as was his pain. "To hear Peter explain it, good came out of the pain and suffering that his father experienced because it brought Peter into contact with his first 'medium'" (4) Never mind that the medium's mysterious approach to healing his father had utterly failed.

Read the whole article.

UCTV - Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow - War of the Worldviews: Exploring Science and Spirituality

This video from UCTV features New Age guru Deepak Chopra and physicist Leonard Mlodinow in one of their traveling debates known as War of the Worldviews. These debates are in support of their book, War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality, in which the two bestselling authors debate the most fundamental questions of human existence. I posted an earlier iteration of this series a while back.

While this is entertaining and all, it's also very frustrating. Both sides present their views and no one seeks the synthesis that is necessary, nor do they seek the understanding that objectivity (physics) and subjectivity (spirituality) are not necessarily in opposition, but that we make them so.

The Atlantic Meets Pacific: War of the Worldviews: Exploring Science and Spirituality

2012 Atlantic Meets the Pacific conference

Atlantic Editor James Bennet interviews Dr. Deepak Chopra and physicist Leonard Mlodinow on their upcoming book about spirituality and science as part of The Atlantic Meets The Pacific, hosted by The Atlantic and UC San Diego. Series: "The Atlantic Meets The Pacific" [11/2011]

Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra is the author of more than fifty books translated into more than thirty-five languages. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. He is founder and president of the Alliance for a New Humanity. Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as "the poet–prophet of alternative medicine."

Leonard Mlodinow
Physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow explores the extraordinary extent to which randomness, chance and probability influence and shape our work and everyday lives. Mlodinow was a writer for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation and co-author with Stephen Hawking of the recent best-seller The Grand Design. His most recent book is Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.

Michael Shermer - What Happens to Consciousness When We Die

In this recent article from Scientific American, Michael Shermer debunks one of the most annoying arguments I see in the New Age people (like Deepak Chopra, who is the target in this article) - the anthropocentric that consciousness is fundamental to the existence of the universe.

The logic gap in this perspective is astounding (and Shermer doesn't even get into that part of it) - the belief that human consciousness, which has been around a mere 500,000 years (and that's being extremely generous) is necessary for the existence of the universe, which has been here for 15 billion years, is mind-bogglingly incoherent to me.

What Happens to Consciousness When We Die

The death of the brain means subjective experiences are neurochemistry

By Michael Shermer  | June 27, 2012

 

Image: Brian Cairns

Where is the experience of red in your brain? The question was put to me by Deepak Chopra at his Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 3. A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as redness) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong. The idea that subjective experience is a result of electrochemical activity remains a hypothesis, Chopra elaborated in an e-mail. It is as much of a speculation as the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that it causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world.

Where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain dies of Alzheimer's? I countered to Chopra. Aunt Millie was an impermanent pattern of behavior of the universe and returned to the potential she emerged from, Chopra rejoined. In the philosophic framework of Eastern traditions, ego identity is an illusion and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal nonlocal, nonmaterial identity.

The hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness, however, has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain. Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by functional MRI, electroencephalography and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, on a computer screen, what someone is seeing.

Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences. The fact that neuroscientists are not in agreement over which physicalist theory best accounts for mind does not mean that the hypothesis that consciousness creates matter holds equal standing. In defense, Chopra sent me a 2008 paper published in Mind and Matter by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman: Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem.

Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents. Consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos and gives rise to particles and fields. It is not a latecomer in the evolutionary history of the universe, arising from complex interactions of unconscious matter and fields, Hoffman writes. Consciousness is first; matter and fields depend on it for their very existence.

Where is the evidence for consciousness being fundamental to the cosmos? Here Hoffman turns to how human observers construct the visual shapes, colors, textures and motions of objects. Our senses do not construct an approximation of physical reality in our brain, he argues, but instead operate more like a graphical user interface system that bears little to no resemblance to what actually goes on inside the computer. In Hoffman's view, our senses operate to construct reality, not to reconstruct it. Further, it does not require the hypothesis of independently existing physical objects.

How does consciousness cause matter to materialize? We are not told. Where (and how) did consciousness exist before there was matter? We are left wondering. As far as I can tell, all the evidence points in the direction of brains causing mind, but no evidence indicates reverse causality. This whole line of reasoning, in fact, seems to be based on something akin to a God of the gaps argument, where physicalist gaps are filled with nonphysicalist agents, be they omniscient deities or conscious agents.

No one denies that consciousness is a hard problem. But before we reify consciousness to the level of an independent agency capable of creating its own reality, let's give the hypotheses we do have for how brains create mind more time. Because we know for a fact that measurable consciousness dies when the brain dies, until proved otherwise, the default hypothesis must be that brains cause consciousness. I am, therefore I think.
 
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/jul2012

Mark Vernon - Physics as Metaphysics: Is there a quantum spirituality?

Writing at Big Questions Online, Mark Vernon takes a critical look at the often well-intentioned but misguided attempts at combing quantum mechanics (QM) and spirituality. In general, whenever someone starts using QM to justify, explicate, or contextualize their spiritual ideas, you can be pretty sure they are cherry-picking ideas to support their own.

The field of QM is so vast and so often in flux that it's easy to pick and choose ideas and theories to support almost any nonsense. One of the most obvious examples of this was the recent "debate" between Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on one side and Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on the other (part of ABC Nightline's Faceoff series, scroll down to the middle of the page). When confronted with actual science by actual scientists, the spiritual gurus did not fare very well.

Vernon is a little less harsh in this article. He is more gentle in his critique, but he names the elephant in the room in most of these "theories" - the anthropic principle - positing human beings and human consciousness as the pinnacle or center of the universe.

Physics as Metaphysics

Is there a quantum spirituality?

photo: US Dept. of Energy: Researcher Matthew Pelt tries to connect the quantum dots

By Mark Vernon

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The notion that physics might have metaphysical meaning for human beings is as old as physics itself. The ancient Greeks did natural philosophy not only to learn about the cosmos but also to learn about how to live. In the medieval period, Aristotelian cosmology became tightly knitted to Scholastic theology, causing all sorts of problems for Galileo when he sought to challenge it. And then in the early modern period, Newton’s discoveries led again to a reassessment of what it is to be human.

No less a figure than Einstein invoked the notion of what he called “cosmic religion.” It would need to ask questions such as whether the universe is friendly towards us, the father of the new physics mused. And the new physics of the 20th century has certainly sparked a welter of speculation as to whether the meaning of life is written in the stars. Are the laws of nature transcendent, like God? Does the fine-tuning of various fundamental constants suggest that the universe is right for life, for us? Is consciousness as basic a feature of things as quarks and photons?

One of the best-known of the spiritualities that draw on the new physics was penned by physicist Fritjof Capra. In his 1975 popular classic The Tao of Physics, Capra relates a vision he had in the summer of 1969, as he stared out to sea from the beach of Santa Cruz. “I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance,” he recalls.

His use of the metaphor of dance stemmed from his knowledge of particle physics, which views matter as a flux of possibilities across fields of energy. Capra draws on one of the most familiar features of quantum physics: the wave-particle duality of light. If you look at it one way, light behaves like a wave. If you look at it another way, it is a particle. The suggestion is that we, as observers, are deeply implicated in the nature of things.

Further, as nothing can be both a wave and a particle, it looks as if the fundamental nature of things lies behind what the Templeton Prize-winning physicist Bernard d’Espagnat has called a “veiled reality.” This conclusion seems to offer a way of synthesizing the activities of science and religion. As Capra continues: “Physicists explore levels of matter, mystics levels of mind. What their explorations have in common is that these levels, in both cases, lie beyond ordinary sense perception.”

Such ideas are very influential, and similar moves have been made by other figures seeking new kinds of spirituality, like the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently, the Episcopal priest Matthew Fox. You can get a feel for it from this remark by Teilhard: “The history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.”

Thus, today, it’s quite common to hear people reflecting that we’re all somehow connected, just like entangled quantum particles that remain linked even when they’re on opposites sides of the universe. Alternatively, there’s the growing spread of what has been called the Universe Story. It tells of the emergence of energy from the Big Bang, that formed the fundamental particles, that coalesced into the elements, that became the building block of the stars, that formed alongside planets, that are nurseries for life, which itself became consciousness, and then self-aware: in us, the universe can contemplate itself.

But does this quantum spirituality add up? A number of critiques can be pressed upon it.

For one thing, the science is itself in a state of flux. The Big Bang, out of which this extraordinary experiment in emergence supposedly came, is itself now widely questioned by physicists. Some prefer a “mega-verse” that continuously gives rise to new universes in a process called “eternal inflation.” Others are asking whether there’s actually a multiverse: our universe is just the one out of the billions that is right for life, and so the fine-tuning is a delusion. Others again, are developing models of a pulsating universe, which expands over the eons to such an extent that it “forgets” its size, and so begins all over again.

Quantum spiritualities can accommodate such developments in science — though a skeptic might observe that they are so nebulous, they could accommodate just about anything. Then again, Capra himself notes, “Many concepts we hold today will be replaced by a different set of concepts tomorrow.” But he believes the basic link between the scientific and the mystical traditions will be enforced, not diminished.

Another critique is the pick-and-choose nature of this cosmic religiosity. It emerges in a number of ways. For example, the entangled nature of quantum particles is highlighted to celebrate our connectedness. What’s overlooked, though, is the colossally destructive power of quantum particles too — the fissions and fusions that release the energy of nuclear weapons. The quantum world is not just a strange place. It’s a hideously violent place too. Spiritualities are wary of celebrating that.

The pickiness appears in other ways. Some advocates, for example, don’t actually like references to fine-tuning and human consciousness because they perceive it as anthropocentric — what is sometimes referred to as the anthropic principle, that the cosmos was designed for us. The fear is that this is a way of reasserting human dominance in the order of things, by declaring we are at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being. Ecologically-minded quantum writers seek something different: a spirituality that puts the planet first. They tend to overlook the priority some interpretations of quantum mechanics give to us observers.

The conclusion would seem to be that quantum spiritualities represent an à la carte approach to the science. It’s not the science that’s driving the spirituality. Rather, the science is being mined and filleted for metaphors and analogies that fit a pre-existing sense of things.

In fact, it ever was thus. When Isaac Newton published his theory of gravity, it was not just astronomers that grew excited. Astrologers did too. The theory of gravity said that bodies act upon one another over vast distances. Isn’t this precisely what astrology had long taught — that the alignment of the planets and stars at your birth had a profound and subtle effect upon the body of the newborn? Newton was saying no such thing, of course. But that did not stop quacks running away with his ideas.

So, I don’t think there is such a thing as quantum spirituality. Instead, there’s quantum physics and then there’s the human quest for meaning. They are distinct enterprises. We gain from both. But throwing them together in a spiritual mash-up creates a spiritual mess. Spirituality is not only about the search for rich metaphors. It’s also about the struggle for fine discernment. The bizarre world of quantum physics teaches us that, too: it is extraordinarily hard to interpret the cosmos aright.

Mark Vernon is a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest. His books include The Meaning of Friendship, Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living, and After Atheism: Science, Religion, and the Meaning of Life. He blogs at www.markvernon.com.

Tags: physics, Science, Spirituality, New Age, Mark Vernon, Big Questions Online, Physics as Metaphysics, Is there a quantum spirituality?, Quantum mechanics, quantum physics, Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Einstein, wave-particle duality, light, energy, Bernard d’Espagnat, multiverse, anthropic principle

3 Quarks Daily - Positive Failure - A review of "The Power" by Rhonda Byrne

3 Quarks Daily offers a detailed and scathing review of Rhonda Byrne's sequel to The Secret (2006), the mega-selling handbook for spiritual materialism and narcissism promoted by everyone from Oprah to all the "law of attraction" hucksters on Twitter.

Apparently it's no longer sufficient to Ask, Believe, and Receive - now you must engage the "Creation Process": Imagine it, Feel it, Receive it.

Oooohh, NOW I get it. Damn, I was doing it all wrong. Uh, yeah . . . .

Here is the first section:

Positive Failure - a review of "The Power" by Rhonda Byrne

Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706.

1. The Law of Attraction

Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The Secret for The Power to change your life, because everything you need to know is contained in The Power.’

According to Byrne and her publishers, Byrne’s oeuvre (The Secret movie, released prior to the book; and various cards, sayings and other fashionable accessories) focuses on readers’ abilities to get what they ‘deserve’, using what is known as ‘the law of attraction’. According to The Secret’s synopsis by her publishers: ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries … By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, this riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be masters of their own lives.’ We become ‘masters’ of our lives by invoking the ‘law of attraction’.

To understand the law of attraction would require either a casual or a long glance at the current trend in the self-help industry. This is the factory-produced, standardised answers to questions of human betterment, which elicits a solipsistic attitude as the touchstone for all problems in the world; a tethered link between religious guilt and nihilistic dismissal, self-help gurus claim to walk this fine line over the precipice of our banal existence.

This is how they do it. The three rules of the Law of Attraction – let us capitalise the letters now – according to Byrne are the following: Ask. Believe. Receive. As Byrne says, in The Secret, it means that: ‘like attracts like. What that means in simple terms for your life is: what you give out, you receive back. Whatever you give out in life is what you receive back in life. Whatever you give, by the law of attraction, is exactly what you attract back to yourself.’ If you want good things to happen, be a good person, think positive thoughts. By doing so, you can have many things granted: if one wants a parking-space, simply ask the universe to provide it for you; if you want that career, simply ask for it, believe in it and you will receive it. By this logic, Byrne then went on to state one of the worst sentences any literate, twenty-first century individual can make. She says, in The Secret: ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.’

Consider this claim. Repeat it to yourself. Then consider the poverty-stricken multi-tudes. We may reasonably assume that horrendously poor individuals desire poverty alleviation, i.e. money, more than many of us already maintaining a regular income. After all, if we are already making money, why do we need to desire it – unless, as Byrne is hinting, we desire more? Of course, Byrne might say our regular income is a result of our ‘desire’ for money (Ask) – but this does not answer the question of the poor. Byrne sickeningly implies that the poverty-stricken, sub-Saharan African mother, dragging her crumpled, dying infant through a diseased village, has brought such hardship on herself. The mother is, after all, ‘blocking’ money from coming to her, thus preventing herself from saving her child.

The problem of course is Byrne never explains how the Law of Attraction works. Quantum physics, the old canard of a dying industry constantly asked for verification, is hinted at – but never elaborated upon. This is a false analogy: quantum physics is spooky and mysterious; the law of attraction is spooky and mysterious; therefore the latter must work according to the same principles. One is reminded of Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who said that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.

In The Power, Byrne has ‘updated’ her ideas from The Secret, invoking something called the Creation Process: ‘Imagine it. Feel it. Receive it.’ Why does Byrne assume we can obtain things through simply feeling and desiring it? She states her reason on the first page: ‘You are meant to have an amazing life! You are meant to have everything you love and desire.’ She proceeds to list the most juvenile of desires; similar to an outline of life as perhaps imagined by comfortable Western teenage girls who have yet to face hardship in life. She outlines things like a happy marriage, a ‘perfect husband’ (yes she actually does say that), money, etc. Her outline is one cheesy sunset away from being a 1920’s Hollywood movie.

And it is an outline, but one drawn with chalk as reality lays waste, constantly, to our dreams and desires. This is not illusory pessimism but reality. To think otherwise is to confine oneself to juvenile denial (to coin a silly word: ‘juvedenial’). By what logic are we meant to have anything, let alone happiness? There is no one we can appeal to; contra Byrne, there is no force that cares about us. We have no reason to accept, as we will later see, Byrne’s assertion of the Law of Attraction. Byrne’s logic is tautological: the law of attraction works because we are meant to have a good life. We are meant to have a good life because of the law of attraction. This shows how vacuous this notion is.

She does attempt something approaching sophistication, as with most adults who can write a fairly coherent sentence. But her sophistication ends up displaying her utter ignorance on matters of the world: ‘Five thousand years ago, ancient scriptures recorded that all of creation was done and complete, and that anything approaching that could possibly be created already exists. Now, five thousand years later, quantum physics has confirmed that every single possibility of anything and everything actually exists now.’

This appeal to authority – an informal logical fallacy – also forgets that people, five thousand years ago, thought the earth flat and the sun a raging god. She does not list her sources for this blanket assertion, so we cannot verify – as usual – her claims. Two points: ‘ancient sources’ are not necessarily good – just as ‘ancient wisdom’ is not necessarily wise. Ancient sources are the sources of ‘ancient wisdom’; but wisdom, like medicine, is either applicable or not: from where and when it comes does not give it a further quality at all. Medicine is medicine, it cures or it does not – there is no such thing as ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicine, for example. It is simply medicine. Similarly, wisdom either aids us in living better, or it is fallacious, solipsistic statements made without foundation – as is the case here

The second point appears to be a misunderstanding of quantum physics or quantum theory’s ideas of non-locality, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, etc. Her statement is nonsense, of course. Many quantum physicists will agree ‘spooky’ things happening to your atoms is not completely out of the question but the likelihood is equivalent to, as physicist Brian Greene says, you randomly marrying Nicole Kidman or Antonio Banderas, as you read this sentence. (This does not apply to any potential lovers of either celebrity). The other important point is all the ‘spooky’ aspects of quantum physics – that we cannot at the same time tell the speed and position of an atom for example – all happens at the quantum level not the everyday or, as biologist Richard Dawkins would say, ‘middle world’: that is what we encounter without the aid of micro- or telescopes. For example, we see rocks as completely solid even though they are, according to scientifically-verifiable observation methods, mostly empty-space. Similarly we do not deal with the quantum, i.e. smallest, level of the natural world because it simply does not operate on a scale which would be useful to us everyday. (This does not invalidate quantum theory; it only highlights that Byrne’s claims that quantum theory has confirmed her own shows up to be nonsense, since quantum theory deals with the quantum level. I would also asked more informed readers on the current trends of quantum physics to correct me, if I am severely mistaken.)

Byrne’s assertion that ‘every single possibility of anything and everything actually exists now’ makes no sense. Surely she cannot ignore the progress of, for example, technology, government and medical science which will show up new inventions, policies and medicines in the future? This is not hope but a logical extrapolation from history: could we have imagined a cure for polio, before we even had a germ-theory of disease? There will be things beyond the imagination of anyone – because we do not have the means to create any of it. We cannot dogmatically assert that every possibility exists now – what does that even mean? It seems this appeal to a static existence is one more feather in the cap of apathy and egotism. Take no heed for the morrow because today everything is possible.

Her undermining of science is shown elsewhere: ‘the law of attraction is what holds every star in the universe and forms every atom and molecule. The force of attraction of the sun holds the planets in our solar system, keeping them from hurtling into space … it holds your car to the road, water in your glass.’ I am not sure why she asserts this, because she has not forgotten about that tiny thing called ‘gravity’. But after mentioning gravity, she implies the Law of Attraction actually subverts or governs gravity. She is remarkably unclear about this. Her idea that planets will hurtle into space if not held, makes it seem like planets ‘want’ to hurtle away; that the only thing preventing them is the law of attraction or gravity (do not worry: I am getting confused, too). Of course, planets are reacting in accordance with the physical laws in the universe – even if hurtled, they would still be operating according to physical laws, not undermining them. Perhaps it would undermine the Law of Attraction, but it only shows then that the Law of Attraction is not a testable, physical law of the universe – it is Byrne’s assertion that all is well because all is well. (We should also note her relating the story of water reacting to positive and negative emotions [p.205]. A view, I think, which has been thoroughly disproved.)

Please, continue reading, it gets better - although I have no idea why they take it seriously enough to spend this much time on it.

Tags: 3 Quarks Daily, Positive Failure, review, The Power, Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, Law of Attraction, culture, spiritual materialism, New Age, narcissism, Ask Believe Receive, Creation Process, Imagine it Feel it Receive it, nonsense, scam