Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the July - August 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Sheldrake, Rupert. "The Extended Mind." Quest  91.4 (JULY - AUGUST 2003):130-135, 149.

By Rupert Sheldrake

MY IDEA OF THE EXISTENCE of the MIND beyond the physical brain is what I call the extended mind. I would like to suggest that the mind is much more extensive than the brain and stretches out through fields that I call morphic fields. Morphic fields, like the known fields of physics such as gravitational fields, are non-material regions of influence extending in space and continuing in time. They are localized within and around the systems they orga­nize. When any particular organized system ceases to exist , as when an atom splits, a snowflake melts, or animal dies, its organizing field disappears from that place. But in another sense, morphic fields do not disappear: they are potential organizing patterns of influence, and can appear again physically in other times and places, wherever and whenever the physical condi­tions are appropriate. When they do so, they contain within themselves a memory of their previous physical existences [The Presence of the Past, p. xviii]. Because the existence of these fields has intrigued me for a long time, I have developed experiments which do provide strong evidence for them as a scientific hypothesis.

We are all familiar with fields that extend from ma­terial objects; the most obvious example is a magnet. The magnet is a physical, material object you can hold your hand, but it has a region of influence stretching all around it—the magnetic field—that is invisible and in have effects over a distance.

Another, more modern example is the cellular phone. The material object you hold in your hand has a mate­rial composition which you can weigh and analyze, but its function depends on much more that its material constituents. It depends on invisible fields that stretch out far beyond the limits of the cell phone itself and whole function depends upon those extended fields. Likewise, the fields of our mind are rooted in the brain, but they extend out far beyond it in accordance with our attentions and intentions.

The idea that the mind is more extensive than the main is not a new idea, but is found in the ancient philosophies of Greece and India and in Buddhist tradi­tions. It is something Theosophists have been talking about for a long time as well. 

The conventional scientific view is that the mind is the brain or mental activity is only activity in the physi­cal brain—in other words, that it is all inside the head. This is what many of my scientific colleagues take for granted. (At least when they are at work.) It is also the view on which billions of dollars are spent every year in medical and brain research, and it is what is taught in schools and universities. It is the mainstream assumption of our culture. However, it is just an as­sumption. It is a theory that hasn't been properly tested because it has not been questioned. We can actually test this theory and refute this assumption by means of fair­ly simple experiments.

As soon as we accept the theory that the mind is more extensive than the brain, a whole range of unex­plained phenomena begin to make sense. These include the sense of being stared at, telepathy, and a whole range of even more mysterious phenomena like premo­nitions. All of these things are normal: normal in the sense that they are common, many have experienced them, they actually happen, and they are part of nature. Yet they are all considered taboo from the point of view of conventional institutionalized science because they do not fit in with the materialistic view of the mind being inside the head. Most scientists prefer not to dis­cuss these phenomena and consider their existence im­possible. In fact, some skeptics get extremely angry at the mere mention of things like telepathy, and there are organized groups of skeptics who serve as vigilantes, policing the frontiers of science and trying to suppress discussion and research on these topics. As I am one of their primary targets, it has caused me to reflect on why people get so angry about this. I think it is because these phenomena are anomalies that threaten the prevailing material worldview. Many people accept the material worldview and have made it something of a religion. Evangelical materialists are terrified that if any of these theories are accepted, science and reason will crumble into dust and that civilization will be overrun by what Freud called "the black mud of superstition." These things are so frightful to some that they feel these theories must be kept at bay at all cost.

Rather than dogmatically denying them outright, testing these phenomena open-mindedly would be in the true spirit of scientific inquiry. All science is based on critically examining evidence to see if there could be alternative explanations. This is how organized sci­ence works.

VISION

To get a sense of the extended mind, we can use the nature of vision as an example. Vision is absolutely funda­mental to the experience of humans and most animals. The usual view of vision is that light travels through the electromagnetic field after reflecting off an object and enters your eyes, inverted images appear on your retina, changes occur in the cone cells, electrical impulses go through the optic nerve, and then complex electrical and chemical patterns of activity occur in the brain. All this has been studied using neuro-physiological meth­ods. But then something very mysterious happens that science cannot explain: you become conscious of what you are seeing.

Consciousness itself is the biggest mystery of science. There is nothing about consciousness in physics, chem­istry, or biology textbooks. Yet it is the basis of all our experience in science itself. The fact that you have be­come conscious of your experience is still a mystery.

An even greater mystery is that the experience you have happening before you is meant to be happening in­side your brain, but you don't experience it as being in­side your brain. You experience the image you see before you as being in front of you! I propose that the image you have of an object is located right in front of you. It is not inside your brain. Vision involves a two-way process: inward movement of light and an outward pro­jection of images. So everything you see around you is where it seems to be. These images are projected out by the mind. They are in the mind because they are inter­preted by your mind, produced by the mind, but they are not inside the brain.

In other words, our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at. The images we project out coincide with what we are seeing. If they didn't, we would be bumping into things all the time. (This would obviously be a dis­advantage from the survival point of view.) The fact that everything goes along smoothly and we are not crashing into things is something we take for granted. This two-way vision is much more in accordance with our experience. It is what Hindus, Buddhists, sages, and Tibetan Masters believe and also what children, usually under the age of ten, believe.

According to the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's studies on children's intellectual develop­ment before the age of ten, the average child believes that vision involves the outward movement of influ­ences from the eyes. After the ages of ten or eleven, Piaget remarks, that the average child learns the "cor­rect view," which is that thoughts and images are invis­ible things located inside the head. 

Most of us have been brought up with this idea. It is part of the standard assumptions of our culture. Most people, when they assimilate this idea, are too young to challenge what is actually a philosophical theory that has become an integral part of our culture. The idea that all thoughts exist solely in the brain started as an ec­centric philosophical theory in the seventeenth century and has now become a predominant theory throughout the Western world. It has never been the dominant theory in other cultures. 

If our minds do reach out to touch what we are look­ing at, this has rather amazing implications. It means we can affect what we look at just by looking at it, and the way we look at it may affect it also. This also means our minds can reach out over enormous distances. For ex­ample, if we are looking at an enormous mountain quite a distance away, our minds reach out that distance. If we look at a star, many light years away, our minds literally reach out over astronomical distances into the universe. 

If I am not just playing with words, then our minds reaching out and touching things should have a mea­surable effect on what we look at. When I first thought of this, I thought that it must be pretty implausible be­cause otherwise it would have already been noticed and documented. Then I realized that people do notice it. Most of us have had the experience of turning around and finding that someone has been looking at us; we have the sense of being stared at. Most of us have also had the experience of looking at others and making them turn around. Ninety percent of the people I sur­veyed had experienced this phenomenon. Surveys com­pleted by Gerald Winer and his colleagues from the University of Ohio have given even higher figures of about 95%. There is a difference in the results between men and women, however. More women than men have experienced the sense of being looked at while more men than women have done the looking, making others turn around.

These are very common experiences. What does sci­ence have to tell us about them? Practically nothing. The total number of papers published on this phe­nomenon between 1890 and 1990 amounted to four. Oddly enough, even parapsychologists have ignored this phenomenon, while most scientists will try to dismiss the results, stating it is coincidence or a matter of chance. But what is the evidence that this is so? In order to examine what the evidence is, we need to do statistical experiments. I have developed an extremely simple experimental method for testing this phenom­enon. It is so simple that thousands of school children have done ft. I conduct these experiments in schools because children tend to be more sensitive than adults, and I found school teachers are interested in them because most school teachers use the power of the gaze as their stock in trade for controlling unruly children!

The experiment includes two people and a blindfold worn by one of them. The person with the blindfold—the subject—sits in front of the other person. A signal, such as a bell, is used to let each person know the ex­periment is beginning. The subject must guess whether they are being looked at or not. The subject says "look­ing" or "not looking" and he or she is right or wrong. If the subject is guessing, they would be right 50% of the time, but the actual score of this experiment is over 50%. When the experiment is done over and over again, the percentage increases significantly. In the "looking" trials the results are 60% correct and 40% wrong. In the "not looking" trials, the results are about 50-50.

Interestingly, when the data is plotted subject-wise, there is a significant change in the results between "looking" and "not looking." When someone is looking at them, there are more people who are right than wrong. This makes perfect sense. In the "looking" trials, people have a sense of being looked at, which is when you would expect the experiment to work. In the "not looking" trial people are being asked to do something that is totally unnatural. We don't have a sense of not being stared at and under those conditions people are just guessing. (The only people who might be conscious of not being stared at are people who are exceptionally vain. But for most people, not being stared at is not something nature has equipped us to sense.) We also know that it is not a matter of subtle clues which allows these results to happen. We have found that the same effect takes place when using a one-way mirror or by having someone stare through a window. Skeptics have repeated these experiments and to their surprise got the same results. [These results can be found in Dr. Sheldrake's book, The Sense of Being Stared At, or on his website at www.sheldrake.org.] 

Similar experiments have been done in a number of universities and institutes using closed circuit television (CCT). For example, Marilyn Schlitz from the Institute of Noetic Sciences has shown that people can sense when they are being looked at even when it is through CCT. In her experiments people are not asked to guess whether they are being looked at or not, but instead electrodes are placed on their fingers and their skin re­sistance is measured. This is much like a lie detector test. When a person is emotionally aroused, a certain amount of adrenaline is secreted into the bloodstream making a person sweat and changing the skin resistance. Schlitz had subjects sit in a room with a video camera on them while the monitor was in another room, some­times a great distance away. When the subject's images on the television screen were looked at, their skin resis­tance changed.

The reality of the CCT experiment led me to look into the experience of those who watch people for a living. I interviewed dozens of security guards, private detectives, the drug squad at Heathrow Airport, and store detectives at Harrods and other shops in London, all of whom look at people through CCT monitors. Most people who work in those fields are convinced that people can tell when they are being looked at even through CCT.

 Many people have found that animals can sense when they are being stared at. Pet owners have found that they can wake their dog or cats by staring at them and that they can tell when their pet is watching them. This shows that the feeling of being watched crosses species boundaries. In fact, when you reflect on this you will see it could have enormous implications in the animal kingdom.

I would like to suggest that all animal vision involves the art of projection of images and the contact of what is being looked at. If prey can tell when predators are looking at them, they can get out of the way. This would be of value to survival behavior of natural selection. This basic ability could have an evolutionary history. What looks like a quirky phenomenon on the margins of human psychology may be an everyday occurrence in the animal kingdom.

Many people have found that animals can sense when they are being stared at. Pet owners have found that they can wake their dog or cats by staring at them and that they can tell when their pet is watching them. This shows that the feeling of being watched crosses species boundaries. In fact, when you reflect on this you will see it could have enormous implications in the animal kingdom.

I would like to suggest that all animal vision involves the art of projection of images and the contact of what is being looked at. If prey can tell when predators are looking at them, they can get out of the way. This would be of value to survival behavior of natural selection. This basic ability could have an evolutionary history. What looks like a quirky phenomenon on the margins of human psychology may be an everyday occurrence in the animal kingdom. 

In this light, it is interesting to reflect on the popular folklore behind the power of the gaze. In India, for exam­ple, it is believed that if you are looked at by a holy per­son, the look is a great blessing; however, there is a nega­tive effect if one looks at another in anger or envy. People believe in the "evil eye" in Southern Europe, the Arab world, Turkey, Greece, India, and many other parts of the world. Many people try to protect themselves against such looks with amulets or special prayers. 

These beliefs also were common in England until the seventeenth century, when skepticism suppressed such thoughts, but in Greece, as mentioned before, this belief is still very common. A research assistant of mine in Athens, appropriately named Socrates, surveyed people in Greece about the evil eye and found that this belief is almost uni­versal. Most modem Greeks who had an education, espe­cially in science or engineering, felt that they shouldn't believe such a thing is true and have a veneer of rational thought, but not very far beneath it is the traditional be­lief in the evil eye. I have no experimental evidence to show that envy does in fact bring about harm, but I think that a belief in the power of the gaze shows that people im­plicitly believe in the mind reaching out to affect what is looked at. When one thinks of this in the context of the predator-prey relationship, then the evil eye makes a lot of sense. It is frightening to be looked at by someone who is envious because it involves a kind of predatory attitude. 

CONCLUSION

There is a huge amount that we don't understand about the mind, but I do think we can tackle each phenomenon scientifically with relative ease. Some people ask me why I waste my time trying to prove things that everyone knows exist. In a sense this is true. All of us have experi­enced these things and know they exist. On the other hand, we have an official system of knowledge in institu­tional science that has been denying these things for a very long time because of the materialistic paradigm. I think as we move beyond the materialistic belief to the belief of the extended mind, we will simply expand the scope of science. This won't involve abandoning science and reason, but it will be good news for science and reason because people will no longer have to go on irrationally denying phenomena that do not fit into their worldview. I think this will be quite liberating even for materialists. None of this comes as a surprise to Theosophists who have studied these concepts for more than one hundred years, but it will make a big difference when these ideas are accepted by institutionalized science for both our un­derstanding of the mind and the implications this under­standing will have in fields like alternative medicine (the impact of mental intentionality on healing), psychology (the impact we have on other people and they on us), and our relationship to the animal kingdom.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and was a scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. He is author of several books including The Sense of Being Stared At, The Presence of the Past, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. This article is transcribed from the Second Kern Lecture, delivered at the Bederman Auditorium, Chicago, Illinois, on March 13, 2003.

Originally printed in the July - August 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "The Zen of Water Sking." Quest  91.4 (JULY - AUGUST 2003):122-123.

By Betty Bland

WATER SKIING is a sport that requires a good sense of balance that does not rely on any external prop. The constant motion of the water gives no reliable foundation, and although the rope is pulling the skier, the skier cannot pull on the rope. Novice skiers can have plenty of frustration until they learn to rely on the central balance point. As any good skier knows, one must maintain an interior balance somewhere just below the solar plexus, somewhat like the balance of a gyroscope. From this balance point, the shock of the waves can be absorbed by flexing one's knees and the pull of the rope can be equalized.

One's relationship to life in many ways resembles the skier's relationship to rope and water. In life, we are buffeted by troubled waters--emotional and circumstan­tial. We are catapulted forward by time and pushed back by our own limitations. Dealing with these difficulties gracefully would seem an impossible task, were it not for the knowledge that there is a reliable center that is un­affected by the turbulence. Somewhere deep inside each one of us is the divine spark, the inner self, which par­takes of the divine universals: power of presence, reliable awareness, and eternal bliss (Sat, Chit, and Ananda). We may not consciously recognize these attributes of our center of being, but life's ups and downs can teach us that this interior self is ultimately the only true point of refer­ence. As we seek to expand our contact with that center, its realities become clearer. 

In her foreword to The Doctrine of the Heart, Annie Besant speaks of the need to balance opposites in a spir­itually attuned life. On the one hand, we as aspirants are told to be without desire, without passion, unmoved by the vicissitudes of life. Yet on the other hand, we are constantly exhorted to feel the anguish of every suffering creature as if it were our own. One should be uninvolved, and at the same time deeply involved. In other words, it is necessary to operate from that balance point which can only be found in the eternal unitive Self.

A similar dilemma appears in the little spiritual guide­book written by Krishnamurti as a young boy, At the Feet of the Master. In it four qualifications are given for the spiritual life: discrimination, desirelessness, right conduct, and love. In the discussion of the second—desirelessness ­the aspirant is told to have no care for comforts, powers, cleverness, or even approbations and to stay out of other people's business. Yet, the discussion culminates with an exhortation to come to the rescue of the weak and down­trodden. The book ends with the fourth qualification—love. By the second qualification, the aspirant is encour­aged to care less; by the fourth, to care more. Here again we see the importance of finding that calm balance point called equanimity.

In Buddhism, the "Four Immeasurables" for the spiritu­al life are the wish for all beings to be happy, the wish for the suffering of all beings to cease, delight in the good fortune of others, and equanimity. Once more we are ex­horted to be immersed in the world while at the same time remaining balanced and away from the fray of the mad­ding crowd. 

The only way we can achieve such balance is to strength­en our awareness of the center point of peace within our­selves through meditation and self-study, identifying with the One Reality—the ground of being. If we truly touch that center, then we can maintain our equilibrium even in the face of death, pain, and loss. We can trust that physi­cal life, although it is maya or illusory existence, yet has a reality and purpose that is far deeper and more profound than appears on the surface. When we finally learn this lesson, we will be able to ride life's waves without falling into the sea; we will be able to endure the pulls and tugs while yet remaining centered in peace. We will know how to live.

Before the eyes can see,
   They must be incapable of tears
Before the ear can hear,
   It must have lost its sensitiveness.
Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters,
   It  must have lost the power to wound.
Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters,
   Its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.

—Light on the Path

 By Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu

By Richard Heinberg

Suppose you could redesign the genetic makeup of any plant or animal species on Earth, including Homo sapiens, to suit your whims. Would you?

For people who lived prior to the twentieth century, this question would have made no sense. No one knew what genes were or what they did. To be sure, plant and animal breeders had been carefully altering domesticated species for millennia, but hardly anyone imagined that it would someday be possible to reach into the very cells of a cow, a pig, a maize plant, or a human being and make minute alterations that would change the organism and its offspring in fundamental--and predictable--ways.

Today the question not only makes sense, it forces itself upon us. Indeed, the genetic redesign of life on Earth is already well under way. By mixing and matching genes, agricultural scientists are already engineering new crops that grow quickly, resist pests, and store well. And animal geneticists are hard at work producing "super cows" that yield more milk, or that produce useful biochemicals in their udders.

Within decades--or perhaps only years--it may be possible for wealthy parents to create "designer children" with specific characteristics: high intelligence, artistic talent, good looks, or immunity to certain diseases and addictions. Medical biotechnologists will grow human skin, blood, and replacement organs genetically matched to their intended recipients.

The biotech revolution inspires both intense hope and great fear. The hope is that, through gene-manipulating technologies, we will eliminate the "mistakes" of nature--diseases and limitations--not only in humans, but also in food crops and domestic animals. In the short term, we will banish hunger and want; eventually we will learn to clone the unique Einsteins and Mozarts who appear among us perhaps only once in a generation or once in a millennium, and by doing so genetically enrich and uplift the entire human race.

The fear is that we will fail in our attempts and trigger a universal biological catastrophe; or that, even if we succeed, in doing so we will erode and destroy the human soul, and perhaps the very soul of nature.

Either way, the implications are enormous.

Dangerous Knowledge?

Every new technology--from the plow to the nuclear reactor--has posed unprecedented moral problems. Computers, for example, require us to think in unaccustomed ways about privacy and the social control of information. Prior to the invention of the computer, no one had to decide whether it was ethical for companies to compile and sell vast amounts of personal data (credit ratings, purchasing habits, and political views) about ordinary citizens. The invention of nuclear reactors and petrochemicals has forced upon us both practical and ethical quandaries having to do with toxic waste disposal: should toxic sites be located in poor neighborhoods where workers live or nearer to where the managers live? Who should pay the health costs entailed by increased cancer rates--investors or the community at large?

Biotechnology raises the moral stakes surrounding technological change to an entirely new plateau, but one with a kind of ancient, mythic resonance. By cloning and gene splicing, we are teasing apart and reshaping the very essence of life. And from the earliest times, human beings have believed that the acts of learning nature's secrets and of manipulating natural processes imply some kind of danger.

The creation story in Genesis tells of the first man and woman, expelled from paradise for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Other familiar myths pursue similar themes: Icarus, whose father fashioned wings for him, flies too high and is dashed to the ground; Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods on behalf of humanity, is eternally punished by Zeus; Pandora, whose curiosity leads her to open a forbidden box, unleashes plagues upon the world. An appropriate "myth" of the modern age brings the message nearly up to date: in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley told of a well-meaning but arrogant scientist who, in his attempt to master the forces of life, dies at the hands of the pitiful monster he has made.

Clearly, human beings both hunger for power over the natural world and at the same time distrust their own pursuit of that power. Recent advances in biotechnology are forcing us to confront this distrust as never before and to decide whether it is based in primitive superstition or primordial wisdom.

To Clone or Not to Clone?

The mythic resonance of the biotech debate is only deepened by the fact that events have brought it into sharp focus as we approach the end of one millennium and the beginning of the next.

In February 1997, the announcement of the birth of a sheep named Dolly--the world's first cloned mammal--provoked a firestorm of controversy. Could the same technique be used to make genetic copies of humans? Would the coming millennium see the realization of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World--a fictional dystopia in which batches of identical human embryos are grown in state-run "hatcheries"?

In December 1997, an eccentric physicist-turned-gene doctor named Richard Seed announced on national radio that he intended to open a human cloning clinic in the Chicago area. "Clones are going to be fun," he later blithely commented to an audience at a Chicago law school symposium on reproduction. "I can't wait to make two or three of my own self."

The prospect of human cloning immediately raised novel fears and hopes. Perhaps, said advocates, in the future people will be able to clone genetically compatible "spare parts"--hearts, livers, kidneys--in the laboratory, thus reducing the dangers and difficulties of organ transplants. Maybe infertile couples will have a new reproductive option. But critics of the idea wasted no time in summoning horrifying visions of a future inhabited by armies of identical, soulless, gene-perfect techno-humans. Cloning clinics catering to the rich could be opened offshore, and biotech insiders estimated that such clinics could be equipped for as little as half a million dollars each.

What had yet to be put in place was a systematic way of looking at the moral problems of biotech. How could fundamentally new ethical questions be approached democratically? Where should society draw the line? And whose morality should be used as a yardstick?

A Spiritual Perspective

Throughout recorded history, in every known culture, people's ideas about right and wrong have been tied to religion--to sacred texts or the revealed will of supernatural beings. But during the past century or so, religion has taken a beating. Scholars have compared the beliefs and practices of various cultures and deconstructed ancient texts, revealing universal motifs and undermining the idea that any particular religion embodies some unique and absolute truth. Astronomers, physicists, and biologists have searched for evidence of God in telescopes and microscopes and come up empty-handed: the natural world apparently operates according to laws that are uniform and humanly comprehensible. And historians have reminded us of the dark side of religious history--the killing of millions for the sake of this or that "one true faith."

In response to these developments, most modern societies have mutated in a secular direction. Whether oriented toward a market economy or a socialist system of wealth distribution, all but a few have tended to reject religion as their basis for judging human behavior. At the end of the millennium, with socialism in retreat and the free market reigning triumphant, most people find it difficult to avoid the perception that everything is for sale and nothing is sacred. Efforts to forge a secular, humanistic system of ethics to replace traditional religion-based morality have met with limited success.

However, despite the apparent triumph of secularism, polls continue to show that an overwhelming majority of people still believe in God. While they may define or characterize God in different ways, depending on their religious backgrounds or affiliations, most poll respondents report belief in a reality beyond ordinary human experience, a reality characterized both by overwhelming power and inherent goodness, a source of love, truth, and beauty.

The public's religious expressions appear to be channeled increasingly along one of two routes: religious traditionalism, and what many regard as a new spirituality. These two approaches in turn yield a wide range of ethical standards relevant to the biotech debates.

By religious traditionalism, I refer to mainstream, orthodox, or fundamentalist movements associated with the great world religions--Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism--and also with the indigenous spiritual traditions of native peoples around the globe. Traditional religious leaders are not united in any given ethical stance toward biotech, and of course not everyone within any given religion or movement agrees with its leaders.

It is possible, therefore, that the new spirituality may provide a more promising avenue for moral evaluation of biotech than traditional religions. By new spirituality, I refer to a transdenominational movement stemming from three main sources. First is a growing public awareness of the history of religion (traceable in turn to recent New Testament scholarship and a widespread interest among Americans and Europeans--flourishing especially since the late 1960s--in Buddhism, Hinduism, and the shamanic religions of indigenous peoples such as the Native Americans).

A second source arises from Jungian-related forms of psychology that regard the realm of the "sacred" not as a figment of human imagination but as an authentic and primary category of human experience. The last is the so-called New Age movement, which itself embraces a wide spectrum of interests. Proponents of spirituality say that they are seeking to avoid religious dogmatism while at the same time honoring the innate human longing for meaning and for connection with some great, overarching pattern or force that transcends the purely material aspects of existence.

The new spirituality is evidently popular, as it is now the basis for an immensely successful literary genre typified by several of the best-selling books of the 1990s. However, while it has many leaders, none speaks authoritatively for the movement as a whole. This is because the new spirituality is not a monolithic--or even an easily definable--entity. If the spirituality movement could be said to have a core of universally agreed-upon tenets, that core might be the "perennial philosophy"--a phrase coined by Leibniz and used by Aldous Huxley as the title for a book published in 1944. The perennial philosophy, according to Huxley, centers on the realization that there is more to us than just our physical bodies (with their genetic predispositions) and our environmental conditioning and that life has meaning. According to this philosophy, each human being is a particularized expression of a universal sacred reality that we each strive to embody and express--a reality whose qualities are identifiable as compassion, justice, truth, and love.

The past quarter-century, during which the spirituality movement has burgeoned, has also been a time of widespread concern about environmental problems. And so the movement has mutated accordingly. Today most people sympathetic to the new spirituality would agree that all of nature is sacred, that it is foolish arrogance to think we can own the earth, and that we are all responsible for maintaining the integrity of the web of life.

These attitudes are directly relevant to the genetic engineering debate and strike a cautionary note. The human body is not a commodity or a collection of spare parts. All organisms belong to the integrity of nature, and we have no right to redesign them for our own profit or convenience.

However, as is the case with traditional religion, spirituality sometimes offers a mixed or uncertain moral assessment of biotechnology. Much of New Age philosophy is about self-improvement and about taking charge of our own spiritual growth. Many writers on spirituality say that humankind is evolving toward godhood, and that the development of new technologies is merely the outer reflection of this inner process. How better to accelerate our maturation as a species than to take charge of the biological process of evolution? The spiritual-evolution cosmological model (traceable to the Catholic theologian and palentologist Teilhard de Chardin, often described as one of the godfathers of the New Age movement) maintains that all of nature is seeking to perfect itself and that humans have a special godlike role to play in this process. Could it be that we are destined to reshape nature, to perfect it, and to perfect ourselves in the process?

Suppose we could somehow produce a race of enlightened beings. Suppose we could isolate the genes that make people creative, intelligent, and compassionate. Suppose we could clone the Buddha. Wouldn't it be our spiritual duty to do so? Wouldn't our refusal be an act of evolutionary cowardice and failure?

The reverential and Promethean brands of spiritual thinking could not be more different in basis and outcome. One emphasizes respect for creation as it is; the other promotes a vision of the purposeful transformation of ourselves and our world. Both have roots that reach far back in time. Today, the ethical dilemmas posed by biotechnology force us to decide: Is Promethean spirituality an authentic revelation about our role in the cosmic scheme or the result of confusing greed-based technological proliferation with a real evolutionary process? And does reverential spirituality offer a reminder of the human need for humility before higher powers or a superstitious brake on the attainment of our divine destiny?

And so, inevitably, the moral discussion that biotechnological developments force upon us is not only about biotech, but also about the meaning and future of spirituality.

Richard Heinberg is the publisher of MuseLetter, a monthly broadside on emerging issues, named by the Utne Reader as a top "Alternative Newsletter" in 1995. He is the author of A New Covenant with Nature (Quest Books, 1996). This article is from his new book Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology (Quest Books, 1999).