The false polarity between spirituality and science is one of the rifts that is dividing the previous generation from the generation of the future. The opening of the windows of perception, through which all scientific discovery occurs, is the uncultivated key to innovation, scientific insight and the advance of humankind. It is through the liberation of consciousness and awareness that science will pass the coming frontiers. There is no other way.
In my time as a writer and journalist living in Israel, I interviewed hundreds of scientists and technological entrepreneurs. From the great innovators that have created what the modern economy has coined “The Start-up Nation” through to Nobel Laureates that from the suburbs of a Northern Coastal town were able to see what leading scientists from the world’s top universities have missed. I have been married to a top mathematician, whose theories are so dense they are hardly deciphered by his contemporaries; and I have congratulated medics on the advent of breakthroughs from the first cultivation of human stem cells through to the team behind The operating room of the future – in which the surgeon’s knife could become archaic when replaced by the non-invasive, masterly tool of focussed ultrasound.
Quasicrystals: “There can be no such animal.”
At the same time, I have been a meditator, teacher of inner growth, and one whose deepest loyalty is to the purity of human experience. As such, there never was a conflict between spirituality and science. Today, after writing I AM HERE, I would even postulate that many scientists I have met visiting our technological institute from the top US and European universities, are the priests of the coming generation. Why? It’s all about perception and reality. In science, as in all pure arts, between the subject and the object of contemplation stands the human scientist. The method and means to clarify and liberate perception itself is the only way – whether through deliberate practise or by default – a scientist will be able to allow the emergence of new information.
There is nothing new under the sun – accept in the limitations we inherit in our inhibitions around the illusion of a polarity between science and spirituality. Perception represents a way of truth and nonduality known to mystics of all traditions. In its purity, it is as far from the prescribed belief systems of traditional religion as traditional scientific education is from the pure frontiers of scientific research.
Any spirituality that is not based on pure perception, is a spirituality limited and controlled through patterns of beliefs and thought structures. In this, certain kinds of experience are prescribed in advance, together with socially acceptable behaviours. The threat of non-observance is the punishment of suffering. Yet, true spirituality is based on living experience and internal inquiry. As with religion, so it is with science. The scientific postulates and theorems based on the past, while supportive to opening the main gates of scientific discovery, become an inhibition when the scientist lacks the freedom of perception to advance beyond those restraints. And freedom is not a state, or a budget, it is a process of inner release.
Prof. Dan Shechtman, Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Breaking the sacred laws of crystallography.
Awakened individuals – that is those whose consciousness is liberated from thought patterns as absolute – are far more likely to be able to break out of dictated patterns and repeated scientific dead ends of cause and effect, than those who adhere with full dogma to the statements of the past. This kind of awakened state, or liberation of mind, can be a result of trauma, stress, or social exclusion.
In Israel, it could indeed be that the potent concoction of pogroms, holocaust, wars and national existential insecurity creates exactly this kind of heightened consciousness in the nation’s scientists. This is not PR for the country, it is simply what it is. For whatever reason, Israeli scientists and innovators are presently making the impossible possible and are becoming increasingly rewarded for having the eyes that can see what others insist cannot be there.
It was this perception through emptiness, in the sanctuary of the laboratory, which led Nobel laureates Prof Avram Hershko and Ciechanover to take the unpopular move of investigating ubiquitin. Ubiquitin is a protein in living cells that is so ubiquitous (in all places at all times) that even though others noticed it was there, no-one thought it notable enough for this research.
Ubiquitin – in every living cell on the planet.
In the back room laboratory in the old medical school in Haifa, Hershko and his young student Ciechanover went ahead anyway, and uncovered the key mechanism – the ubiquitin system – that tags a cell for life or death. This is today revealed as critical in the understanding and treatment of diseases from cancer to neurodegeneration. What made them notice the ubiquitous and stand for their unfashionable research? An ability to see what others overlook – that which is directly obvious, and under the nose, and the ability to trust their own unpopular perception.
Several years later, also from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Prof. Dan Shechtman won a belated Nobel Prize for his discovery of Quasicrystals. This young Israeli professor had been on sabbatical in the US some decades earlier, and observed through the electron microscope a five pointed crystal – something which the whole cannon of acceptable crystallography denied could exist. He counted the points several times, and counted them again. He announced his findings to the world and was publicly ridiculed by others – including two times Nobel laureate Linus Paulin.
Yet he saw what he saw, and he stood for it, despite all the dictates of the text books he was himself teaching, and despite most elated scientific authority on the planet. His loyalty to the clarity of his own perception in fact almost made him unemployable, persona non-grata. Only as the quasicrystal began to be accepted as true and not a random freak, and the text-books began to be reproduced to account for the anomaly, did other scientists claim that they had seen this structure too, but had failed to believe their own eyes. What is the qualitative difference? A difference in the quality of perception, and the self-esteem given to the power of individual perception despite all external dictates and authorities. It is not the trauma that makes these scientists and innovators successful, it is rather the refinement in the opening of the windows of perception from a fearless, nothing-to-lose position. Let’s take a look at the windows, to see how scientific mastery arises in the holy space of the laboratory through the third and most authentic layer of all, the perception through emptiness.
Consciousness
The window of consciousness is connected very much with the thinking mind – with waking consciousness. It is clear that an open mind is a key to scientific success. Yet what is open mindedness? It is the non-attachment to thoughts, in a manner that all thoughts are relative and not absolute. Thinking as an activity itself takes on a playful quality as the scientist’s consciousness is free from being determined by any one idea, perspective of postulate. As scientists are human, it is not only the liberation from the limitations of all the science that went before that is necessary – together with the pure concentration of peace of mind that arises out of attention in the Power of the Now.
She or he must also be relatively free of her personal human mental limitations – such as gender identification, thought patterns around success and failure, or authority issues. Freedom of consciousness to attach and release concepts and ideas, to combine them and to let them go, is a key in scientific innovation.
Even if this freedom is only a given at the time of “doing” science, in the laboratory or in the solitude of the university, this is a holy space where consciousness needs to be elevated in order to attain an overview and in order to allow the unconditional playfulness of thinking “outside of the box”, without crime or punishment. When entering such a scientific sanctuary, whether it be a mathematician’s work space or the laboratory of an engineer, there can often be left an atmosphere of stillness from this state of unconditional contemplation of form through the perceptive window of consciousness.
Paradoxically, this freedom of mind is often gained by living in a culture where there are many contradicting truths and realities: so many, that no point of view can take an absolute hold on the perception of the individual. Israel, with its culturally fragmented patchwork of immigrants and socio-political positions is such a fertile soil for new ideas – partly because every idea is possible. It is quite hard to go “of the map” of Israeli cultural consensus. In fact, it is often quite hard to find a map at all.
Awareness
Awareness is the perceptive window connected with feeling, vibration and love. Although in a constant interaction with consciousness, awareness as a perceptive window exists at a deeper level of Being (how it “feels” to be you) and will persist in its patterns and space time regardless of our mental attempts to control or shape it. Although it might appear otherwise, scientists equally relate to their object of contemplation through awareness – as if the object of contemplation were a sentient, living partner.
It is not by accident that when Shechtman first observed the quasicrystal, he announce “There is no such animal”. In that time and space, he was David Attenborough in the wild, observing the local wildlife in pure silence of heart. He was engaging with a material world he believed to be inanimate.
When awareness is open, science is allowed to manifest as a dialogue between subject and object, or between the scientist and the miraculous world he is revealing. Science is not only about thinking. It is also very much about intuition, and about attraction and distraction. If the mathematician is burdened with financial fears or is in a deep fight with his mother, his mental freedom and his access to inspiration can be limited by a closure of heart.
A closed heart, like a closed mind, will slam shut the gates of inspiration and innovation.
In science the individual reaches beyond itself in the quest for an objective contemplation of an object. Any feelings that are localized to the “person” of the scientist, come between them and direct contemplation. They cloud the view – like mud on the windscreen of a car. The drive behind science – the sentient drive that can elevate a scientist beyond authority issues, personal depression, grief or shame, is love – the love for something higher than himself. This can be a love for truth; a love for science itself, for humanity as a whole, but in Israel there is often an extra drive which is love for the mission of revealing the passion and beauty of life despite personal and national legacies of fragility and destruction.
This redemption can be found through the pure sentient contemplation of the objective world. Those cells in the laboratory, those mathematical formulas, or those crystalline structures which are available to all who have the eyes to see – regardless of who they are. Through the scientists inquiry into the objective world, the pure beauty of humanity itself – without borders of distinctions, begins to shine in its beauty.
Pure perception: Albert Einstein at the age of three.
Perception through Emptiness
When Einstein met the Indian mystic Tagore, he declared that this man is holding onto less beliefs than modern physics. The ability to perceive through the impermanence of time and the limitation of space without agenda of what should be seen – that is, the ability to perceive through illusion as practised in the perception through emptiness – is the master-key to both science and spirituality.
This perception through emptiness, and the liberation it brings, is precisely that which allows the freedom of awareness and the open-mindedness of heightened consciousness which is necessary for pure discovery. So many of our limitations, from perception of the object of scientific inquiry, through the scientists own self perception, are arising from illusions we put down in time and space – illusions created out of fear.
“We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.” – Albert Einstein, founder of the 1st Technion Society.
Israeli scientists like Shechtman historically had nothing to lose. Piecing together broken pieces of themselves in a new country without recognized borders, the investment in success or failure has been much less. The situation of collapse in belief structures emerging after the holocaust is one which supports the liberation of perception – to see the world for real and to be ready to die for that. Any agenda, fear-based belief, authority issue, or egoic self interest is likely to sabotage pure scientific inquiry. This is the stuff that blind the scientist, that block closes the windows of perception.
A word about the Unperceivable
Beyond and behind all perception there is a ubiquitous source of perception. This is an area we are all ignoring – that which cannot be perceived. We take it totally for granted each time we go to sleep to – where? We step over millions of perceptive blinks throughout our waking day – using our consciousness and awareness as stepping stones, as if these gaps in the forms or information of perception were not there – and worse – as if these gaps were not important.
Yet, whether in the artist’s studio, school room or laboratory, all of us – all of us – reach into this space beyond perception in order to get direction, insight, in fact, in order to reconnect with the power source of all we are.
Imagine the pure mathematician, struggling with a problem, with all possible strategies exhausted. Where does he look for inspiration? He closes his eyes for a moment, and lets go of all preconceptions and expectations; he relaxes his feelings, and releases all need, just letting the problem “BE”. She then waits – perhaps only for a microsecond, yet there is a waiting for an answer to arise, or a soulful listening for the inspiration to come. If the scientist is open in perception, something new arises. If consciousness is not free, then just on this invitation to the beyond, directions of inquiry often emerge while the scientist sleeps.
Sooner or later – the scientific “prayer” is answered – for the ones who are able to hear. This is the dialogue we all have the unperceivable – the mysterious dimensions of ourselves which are beyond even the forms of perception as we know them. These are the dimensions in which the scientist was never a separate entity from the science or from the object of contemplation – and it is through the opening of these windows of perception to those dimensions that we will reveal our enlightened future.
