Quest Magazine

From Duality to Polarity in the Works of Jean Gebser

Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Hoepfl-Wellenhofer, Susanne, "From Duality to Polarity in the Works of Jean Gebser" Quest 110:2, pg 32-34

By Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer

Susanne Hoepfl Wellenhofer 1 The words duality and polarity are often used interchangeably, but discerning between these two concepts is extremely important in the metaphysical sense. Knowing the difference enables us to avoid misunderstandings and half-truths and clearly align our consciousness. This became clear to me when I discovered the writings of Jean Gebser (1905–73), a German-Swiss poet, cultural philosopher, historian, and intellectual mystic. Reading Gebser’s work is no easy task, and it took me many years to study all his books and lectures. But I was so intrigued by his concept of integral consciousness that I stuck with it.

Gebser concluded that human consciousness has transitioned through four levels: the “archaic,” the “magical,” the “mythical,” and the “mental-rational,” and is now transitioning towards the “integral” level of consciousness (Gebser, Ursprung, 83–164; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35). He pointed out that this level must go past the rationalistic unambiguity and the dualistic either-or dichotomy of the mental-rational consciousness and into a both-and way of thinking (Gebser, Verfall, 39).

Gebser calls these transitions “mutations” and believed that they involve structural changes in both the mind and the body. He explained his thesis in his work, Ursprung und Gegenwart, which was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953 and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin.

The archaic structure is almost completely instinctual, zero-dimensional, nonperspectival, and there is a total absence of differentiation or sense of separation. Humans and the world are identical.

The magical structure marks the first step toward a waking human consciousness. It is one-dimensional and egoless, a preperspectival state of timelessness and spacelessness. The magical man was part of his environment and felt secure only within his group. Its deficient form results in serfdom and collective trance (Gebser, Ursprung, 87–106; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

In the mythical structure the soul experiences something as an other and lives in a two-dimensional polarity. It unfolds in symbols rather than in calculation. Its deficient form inflates symbolism and uses tales in an addictive way (Gebser, Ursprung, 106–25; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

The domain of the mental-rational phase of consciousness is the thinking mind. The world is seen as an object. It is three-dimensional, and cognition operates on the principle of duality. The deficient form of this structure is a dissociation from the unity of experiencing and thinking and an overemphasis on logic. (Gebser, Ursrpung, 125–64; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

The characteristic of the integral structure, which Gebser also called the aperspectival structure of consciousness, is a transparent lucidity capable of seeing through all dimensionalities and time forms (Gebser, Ursrpung, 165–72). In Jeremy Johnson’s words, “space is no longer empty of value or opaque as it is in the perspectival world but full and transparent. Integrality, then, is the fully expressed and innate wholeness of all the mutations” and “sees through to the spiritual reality that substantiates all worlds and all time forms: the ever-present reality of origin” (Johnson, 130). For the integral level of consciousness to arrive, we must discover what it means to be space-free and time-free, which, for Gebser, is learning to be ego-free.

For Theosophists who have read about the stages of human evolution in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and the timelines for the different root-races, it might be interesting to know that Gebser is deliberately vague about those time periods. Ken Wilber, an integral theorist who acknowledged Gebser as an important source for his model, estimates that the archaic level of consciousness began 3 to 6 million years ago and lasted to around 200,000 years ago (Feuerstein, 58). The mutation of the magical consciousness coincided with the appearance of Homo erectus. This human species was the first to use fire (Feuerstein, 75). Feuerstein argues that the early, mythical structure could be placed around 20,000 to 12,000 BC (Feuerstein, 76). The entire period from around 10,000 BC to 500 BC, which may be the time of transition from the mythical to the mental-rational consciousness, was marked by tremendous upheavals (Feuerstein, 95).

In his book Verfall und Teilhabe (“Decline and Participation,” which has not been published in English), Gebser emphasized that reaching the integral structure of consciousness required understanding the difference between duality and polarity. He criticized the belief that these terms are interchangeable and supported his opinion with quantum theory and discoveries by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others. He said that we must overcome Aristotelian determinism and its dualistic thinking—the belief that a given entity must be one thing or another (Alternativdenken)—the three-dimensional geometry of Euclid, the atomic theory of Democritus, and the heliocentric view of the universe, pioneered by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC. We must also overcome the belief that duality entails a negative and a positive that conflict with each other. Seeing polarity as complementary forces, in which the negative and positive attract each other and work together to create balance, will help us make our transition into the integral structure of consciousness (Gebser, Verfall, 39).

Gebser supplies specific examples for the transition from the mental-rational structure of consciousness to the integral one, such as: “Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence”; “goal-oriented, purposive thoughts are replaced by unintentionalness” (Absichtslosigkeit); the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative idle motion (Leerlauf) is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process. Prejudice is replaced by the renunciation of value judgments, manipulation is replaced by the patient acceptance of providential powers, action is replaced by poise/attitude (Haltung), and Homo faber, the human being as artificer, is replaced by Homo integer, the integrated human (Gebser, Verfall, 62; Feuerstein, 170).

In another lecture, Gebser mentions that he had received statements from young people who “distinguish themselves with a fundamentally new attitude. Compared to the previous deficient mental rationality, it expresses integral consciousness, although they do not harbor any resentment” toward the earlier mode (Gebser, Verfall, 59). He writes that these are “more self-critical; they know more about their weaknesses, which they openly admit and are working to overcome, and they make demands on themselves and not on the environment.” He states further that they are “open, in a completely unsentimental way, tolerant, capable of loving, not arrogant, silent, and shielded from the inside against the lure of money, property, power, fame, and no longer are exposed to the flight into the means [of escapism], the lie, the split, and mere sexuality” (Gebser, Verfall, 60).

The last book I read by Gebser was his first: Rilke and Spain, a short monograph on the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In this book, Gebser shows that he grasped that the troubled times he lived in contained the embryonic beginning of the integral consciousness. We encounter Gebser’s first tentative explorations of this theme in this book (Feuerstein, 128). In discussing Rilke, Gebser writes:

The notion of objects has lost its significance, together with perspectivity, achieved using adverbs by which objects were meant to be deepened or interpreted according to the viewpoint of the observer. What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light that prevails between objects—the tension and relation between them. (Gebser, Rilke, 41–42; Feuerstein, 128)

Gebser is pointing toward a mode of consciousness that is no longer based on perspective, as it is in the mental-rational structure. Gebser describes how Rilke’s great existential crisis eventually led him to come to terms with the phenomenon of death, leading him toward a nondualistic type of thought:

The Yes to life becomes at the same time a Yes to death. More than that, it is in two at the same time because it has erased the boundaries: It is a single space, a single world, which at every moment encompasses the two phases of development, because time, the organic component, has become the fourth dimension. (Gebser, Rilke, 46; Feuerstein, 128–29)

Gebser emphasizes that the integral level of consciousness, which in his opinion has been constellating since the turn of the twentieth century, depends on each individual person for its full emergence. All must do the work of self-transcendence, which, as he admits, is the most difficult of all human tasks.

All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this preacceptance of the pain and torment, they will otherwise be visited upon us in individual and universal collapse. (Gebser, Ursprung, 676)

Studying Gebser and trying to get a deeper understanding of his thought eventually led me to Theosophy and helped me understand the difference between duality and polarity on a spiritual level. In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky explained that the manifested universe “is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its existence as ‘manifestation.’” She added that the opposite poles of subject and object, and spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity, in which they are synthesized. She went on to observe that “evil” merely denotes the polarity of matter and spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested principles in space and time. But these principles are ultimately one, being rooted in the Absolute (Blavatsky, 1:15–16).

In simpler terms, duality implies separation, meaning that the two are separated. But polarity tells us that they are two poles of the same thing. Thus we are talking about polarity within unity. That is the secret: understanding that we are all one with the Absolute and thus with all else.

It is not enough to merely understand the difference between polarity and duality. We must live this polarity within unity, think it, breathe it. That takes tremendous effort, and the path to integrating it into everyday life is different for everyone. As Pablo Sender explains in Evolution of the Higher Consciousness, in order to “stabilize the perception of unity,” we must gradually integrate it into daily life (Sender, 171). The concrete suggestions in Sender’s book have helped me to work on this goal daily. They have helped me understand that polarity is the dyad of equal, mutually complementary poles, based on the natural balance of the divine order.

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.

Fuhr, Reinhard, and Hellbusch, Kai. “Jean Gebser: Das integrale Bewusstsein: English Summary of Jean Gebser, ‘The Integral Consciousness.’” Integral Review 1 (June 2005): 22–34: https://integral-review.org/issues/issue_1_jun_2005_full_issue.pdf.

Gebser, Jean. Rilke und Spanien [“Rilke and Spain”]. In Abendländische Wandlung [“Western Change”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe [“Complete Works”], volume 1. 3d ed. Schaffhausen, Germany: Novalis Verlag, 2003.

———. Ursprung und Gegenwart [“The Ever-Present Origin”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, 3d ed., volumes 2 and 3.

———. Verfall und Teilhabe [“Decline and Participation”]. In Vorlesungen und Reden zu “Ursprung und Gegenwart” [“Lectures and Discourses on ‘The Ever-Present Origin’”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, volume 5:2. 2d ed., 1999.

Johnson, Jeremy. Seeing through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Seattle, Wash.: Revelore, 2019.

Sender, Pablo. Evolution of the Higher Consciousness. Ojai, Calif.: Fohat, 2018.

Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer was born in Austria and has been living and working in the U.S. since 1986. She is currently the president of the D.C. Lodge, contributes to the Theosophical Wiki and the Online School of Theosophy, and mentors prisoners. She retired from the German department of the George Washington University in 2019. She still translates from German to English and teaches yoga.

Duality: The Problem and the Solution

Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kezwer, Glen, "Duality: The Problem and the Solution" Quest 110:2, pg 29-31

By Glen Kezwer

Glen Kezwer Two polar opposites: duality and oneness. The first is the problem confronting humanity; the second is the solution.

Duality is the vision which accepts two different realities, taking both to be equally real. These realities can be described as consciousness and matter, the inner Self and the world, the seer and the seen, the knower and the known, I and you. In other words, duality is the sense of otherness.

In one sentence, duality means that as soon as you wake up, there are two separate things: one is the body, and the other is your “I”—your inner consciousness, your Self. In terms of everyday perception, duality is the mechanism with which we normally view the world. This mechanism involves two elements: the seer who sees, and the world the seer experiences. Duality is the understanding that these two elements are separate. When we look at the world in this way, we do not perceive the underlying oneness. Yet this oneness is the essential truth—unperceivable to the senses—which underlies the physical universe in which we live. The Theosophical Society brands oneness as “the Unity of all life.”

Duality can be called difference. In fact, difference and duality are synonymous, and they come from the mind of a human being.

Differences begin when the waking state of consciousness begins . . . You too have never found any differences while in the state of deep sleep. Even if you choose to differ with what I am saying, in order to make that choice you must resort to your waking state of consciousness, because this is where your mind arises. This shows that the waking state and the mind are one and the same reality. (Swami Shyam, 52)

This quote contains two important elements. The first is that we don’t experience duality while we are asleep. Most people tend to dismiss sleep as irrelevant, a state of unconsciousness or nothingness, which gives our physical and mental systems their needed rest but otherwise has no practical value. But let’s look a little deeper. No matter what we may be suffering from—a painful disease, mental anxiety or worry, grief at the passing of a loved one—that suffering completely vanishes as long as we are asleep. This is not a trivial point. It shows that we have the power within ourselves to be free from all suffering during those hours. The question is, can we create a state of freedom that is free of problems as deep sleep is, yet also embodies awareness? I will return to this question later on.

In the first paragraph of this article, I called duality the problem of humanity. By this I mean that when we are under the influence of duality, we experience all of the pain and suffering, but also the joy and happiness, of the world. We undergo duality from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night. The world is entirely composed of differences. We see a multitude of objects that are separate from one another and especially from ourselves: human beings, cars, trees, mountains, milk cartons, and so on are all distinct and separate entities. Time and space separate all things and events. And this is the only way it could be; otherwise, there would not be a universe in which we live.

Why is this a problem? Simply put, duality creates pain and suffering, and human beings want to remove pain and suffering. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali call the suffering we want to avoid heya, which is echoed in the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The essence of the world is suffering, and human beings wish to avoid it.

The opposite of duality is oneness. (Actually, there is no opposite of oneness, since it is absolute, but for the purposes of our discussion here, this definition is useful.) Oneness is the ultimate goal of the path of spiritual pursuit, which unites everything into one seamless, undivided reality. This reality is the essence of all human beings, all living creatures, and all of creation. It is beyond space and time, birth and death, and all other pairs of opposites. It cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind, yet is the source of all. Oneness is poetically described by the Sanskrit mantra

Om poornamadah poornamidam poornaat poornamudachyate
Poornasya poornamaadaaya poornamevaavashishṣyate
The inner world is oneness. The outer world is oneness.
If you take from oneness, oneness remains, and that which you take is oneness. (my interpretation)

Since there is nothing in ordinary human experience to compare to oneness, to understand it, we can make use of the metaphor of the waves on the surface of an ocean. From the surface, all the waves appear different. They move at different speeds and come in different sizes and shapes, and some are breaking and some are not. Yet if we go down to the deeper water beneath the waves, all is still and calm. The waves represent the infinite forms which comprise the universe. They all look different, but just as the essential nature of each wave is water, which is one and the same everywhere, the essential nature of all the forms is universal oneness. If we plunge beneath the mind’s surface of thoughts, we find stillness and peace.

The dictum of Adi Shankaracharya, the chief formulator of the Advaita Vedanta, sums up oneness: brahm satyam jagat mithya. Brahm, the highest consciousness, which is the unchanging source of the universe, is real, and the world is an illusion. Essentially Brahm is one without a second, and the world exists only as long as one has not realized this truth.

How do we proceed from duality to oneness? To answer this question, I would like to introduce the four premises on which this article is written: (1) Duality causes pain and suffering, and at the same time happiness and joy. Happiness and unhappiness are just opposite sides of the same coin; both result from the experience of duality. (2) The mind is the creator of duality. (3) The mind is equivalent to the waking state. (4) The waking mind and the differences it creates can be transcended or overcome by observing them in meditation from the perspective of our essential inner being, the Self or Knower.

Our examination of duality and oneness should not merely be abstract philosophy. It should be relevant to our daily lives. As an example of how this works, let’s look at Patanjali’s three broad categories of pain.

1. Parinaam: pain due to our interactions with the constantly changing world in which we live. I recently had an interaction with an old friend who spoke rudely to me. It was definitely unpleasant and took some time to recover from. This is an example of pain caused by a change in my environment, from a state of being easy with my friend to uneasiness.

2. Taap: pain caused by worry or fear concerning possible future events. Many people are fearful of losing their home, job, or family or of becoming ill.

3. Sanskaar: pain resulting from the memory of a past unpleasant event. A friend of mine once sold his house, and shortly afterwards the housing market skyrocketed. Had he waited just a little while, he would have sold it for a much higher price. He lamented over this for years.

These simple examples represent the myriad types of pain a human being can experience.

Considering the second premise, that the mind creates difference, my starting point is the state of dreamless sleep. As I stated above, while we sleep, we experience no differences whatsoever—no worries, no happiness, no unhappiness, no disease, and in fact no world at all. In the state of deep sleep, nothing we experience while we are awake or dreaming appears. Of course, the entire gamut of the world returns to our consciousness when we wake up, which means that our minds return. With the appearance of the waking state, everything is created simultaneously. In an instant, you are a human being lying in a bed. Everything around you is familiar or unfamiliar, as the case may be. All that you perceive is different from you—your bed, your surroundings, the clock on the night table, the window looking out onto your backyard, and even your thoughts. The mind and the waking state are the same thing. Upon awakening, we are embedded in a world of duality, residing in time and space, which we call the waking state.

Is there a problem here? Well, yes, because in the waking state we suffer, both physically and mentally. I remember my father referring to the world as a “vale of tears.” I think his attitude is quite common. Of course, we also experience happiness, joy, love, and beauty in our lives, and we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Furthermore, we do need duality in order to survive. I’m going to the dentist this morning. I have to know that I have a tooth problem, that the dentist is the person who can take care of it, where the dentist’s office is, how to pay him (often the hardest part), and so on.

The problem arises when we believe duality to be real. The mind says it is located in your head, and everything you perceive outside of you is not you. This is the essence of difference. It is the source of problems, the creator of friction, of rubbing: I like something; I don’t like something else. This leads to suffering and joy or conversely happiness and unhappiness.

It is important to dispel any notion that the mind is bad or somehow should be destroyed or eliminated. The eyes see, the ears hear, and the tongue tastes. In the same way, the mind generates thoughts on the basis of the sensory input it receives. That is what it is supposed to do. You need your mind to order from a menu, use your credit card, drive your car, or talk to your friends. It is simply doing its job, which is essential to our existence as human beings. The problem comes when we interpret the thoughts of the mind in either a positive or a negative way.

Happiness is decided upon by the human mind. The World Series is on now. When a game is over, the fans of the winning team celebrate and those of the loser are dejected, but there is only one game. So the problem must ultimately be handled on the level of the mind, which can be transformed, and not on the level of the events of the world. This is not to say that we don’t make every effort to improve our situation in life, but ultimately the mind must be transformed.

How do we get away from this problem, since the mind created it in the first place? Here I will return to the question I posed above: is there a state that is problem-free, as in sleep, yet also contains awareness?

This state is meditation, which creates a new perspective on the mind. In meditation your awareness turns into a sense that nothing is separate from you. In a scientific experiment, we need an observer and something observed. In meditation I will call the observer the Knower, which observes the thoughts that come and go in our minds. The Knower can also be called the witness or watcher. It provides an entirely new outlook on the mind. It perceives the mind and everything it creates, yet at the same time is free and untouched by all of its perceptions. As a free being, the Knower can choose to accept or not accept what the mind says. In other words, the Knower is free of the pain-producing thoughts of the mind.

Meditation in no way means that you have to stop your thoughts from coming. No matter how hard you try, you cannot do so anyway. Unfortunately, the popular misconception that they have to stop their thoughts in meditation leads many to abandon its practice. The key is to put your attention on the Knower-Self. If thoughts come, your meditation is not disturbed. The Knower is freedom. The Knower is oneness. Let your thoughts come and go, but keep your attention on the Knower. Your attention may stray from the Knower. When you realize this, understand that nothing wrong has happened, and gently return your attention to the Knower.

You will find that with practice, when you open your eyes after meditation, the awareness of oneness that was there does not disappear. You reenter the waking state, bringing the freedom of the meditative state into the waking state and realizing that all is you.

In other words, you will realize, as the Theosophical Society puts it, that “every existent being—from atom to galaxy—is rooted in the same universal, life-creating Reality. This Reality is all-pervasive, but it can never be summed up in its parts, since it transcends all its expressions.”

Source Material

Swami Shyam. Shyam’s Philosophy. Kullu, India: International Meditation Institute, 2003.

Glen Kezwer is a physicist who has been practicing and researching the science of meditation since the early 1980s. Following the spiritual path is the central focus of his life. He is the author of Meditation, Oneness, and Physics and The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, as well as many articles on science, meditation, and spirituality. He is a course author with the online teaching website Transformationmeditation.com. He can be reached at gkezwer@gmail.com.

Dualism or Nondualism? Your Choice!

Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Srinivasan, A.V. (Sheenu) "Dualism or Nondualism? Your Choice!" Quest 110:2, pg 25-28

By A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan

The kingdom of God is within you.

—Luke 17:21

Dr. A.V. Sheenu Srinivasan History records that ancient sages in every faith have asked some fundamental questions about life on earth. They have studied the meanings of the terms “I” and “you.” When we say “I,” does it refer to my body, my mind, or any other entity or state of being that is in us?

These sages identified a concept that they claimed to be inherent in every living being and defined it as soul. As with the mind, we cannot see it or touch it, but it is there: it exists. This is a belief that every faith system has acknowledged, although they continue to argue its status in relation to the universe at large: that is, the connection, if any, of one’s own soul with every other soul and with something that encompasses all.

Along the same lines, there has prevailed a desire to know the entity behind such regular but constantly changing phenomena such as the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, seasons, the birth, growth, decay, and death of living beings. Who controls these events? Who could be so powerful? Is there a being out there that we need to revere, fear, or love in order to maintain some sort of balance here on earth?

This enquiry has led over and over to the concept of a supreme power or Supreme Being. Should such a being exist, does it have a gender or a soul? If so, is there a connection between this Supreme Soul and individual souls? The general conclusion has been that there is such a being: divine, unseen, but essentially worthy of realization. But where does such a being dwell? Can one ever see or fully comprehend this being?

The supreme divinity (paramatman, the Supreme Soul), which Hinduism defines as Brahman, is deathless, beyond time, beyond space, and not bound by any laws of causation. It has no gender or form and is beyond description.

Hinduism claims that Brahman is the only Reality, arguing that realization of Brahman should be life’s goal because it will lead to moksha: a final release from repeated life and death cycles, whereby the individual soul finally merges with the Supreme Soul after following certain extraordinary spiritual practices. In fact Hindus believe that this is truly the goal of life: to once and for all escape the suffering that is inevitable while living on earth.

The study of the connection between the soul and the Supreme Soul has given us several philosophies to consider to give purpose, understanding, and meaning to life. Such a goal was mandated with crisp aphorisms (“Know thyself,” for example) and constituted a belief system in different cultures in the ancient world.

The nature of this connection among individual souls and the Supreme Soul is the subject of this discussion, which is based on the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta (“culmination of knowledge”). Vedanta insists that you should come face-to-face with any existences beyond those you sense. You need to begin by admitting that “I” does not mean your body, your mind, or your ego. “I” refers to the soul, which is not matter. If there is a universal and Supreme Soul, you should encounter it directly and remove all doubts.

There’s no need to struggle in attempting to believe—just realize. Use the ancient tools of the six darshans (perspectives) on the Hindu Vedas—including Nyaya, logic, which has to do with sorting out the physical world and the mind-body-spirit connection, and yoga, which has to do with self-discipline. Bhakti yoga, for example, entails total devotion to the divine.

Three systems of Vedantic philosophy emerged from these considerations:

Advaita (nondualism), propounded by the saint Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE.
Vishishtadvaita (qualified monism or qualified nondualism) admits a personal God as ultimate reality. The proponent saint of this philosophy was Ramanujacharya, who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He acknowledged that Reality is indeed Brahman but allowed that individual souls as well as the universe are also real and separate.
Dvaita (dualism). This system claims that the Supreme Soul and the individual soul are different. Its proponent saint was Madhvacharya, who lived in the thirteenth century CE.

The three Vedantic paths all have the same goal: reaching moksha—that is, breaking free of the cycle of rebirth and death. Hindus believe that rebirth is inevitable for those who die without moksha, but if this is achieved, all misery will end, and the soul will be at complete peace and bliss. As a result, one must strive for freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth.

Although all three Vedantic philosophies share a belief in God, individual souls, and the associated fundamentals (such as the necessary quest for knowledge, respect for nature, devotion, dharma, karmic consequences, and so on), differences among them exist. Here we will examine only two of these three belief systems: dualism (Dvaita) and nondualism (Advaita).

Dvaita

Madhvacharya’s Dvaita school divides individual souls into three categories:

Those fit to be liberated through the grace of God and spiritual practices.
Those who are interested only in the material world, with little craving for a spiritual life.
Those who are inherently evil and end in hell. In the Dvaita, hell awaits these individuals, even if it is mainly a purgatorial interval before the next birth.

According to the Dvaita philosophy, an individual soul has its own consciousness, willpower, and ability to learn, know, act, and experience joy. As a reflection of God, it reflects some of God’s attributes. The individual soul is forever dependent on God. Each soul residing in a body is subject to bondage. Actions affect the soul, contracting it by bad karma (actions) and expanding it by good karma.

The primary godhead of Madhvas (followers of the founder, Madhvacharya) is Vishnu, who has these divine attributes: he is merciful and lovable, and he takes on human avatars while remaining as the Almighty. No evil attributes whatsoever are attributed to him.

Release from bondage occurs through many lives and depends upon the type of life led. Lives led with devotion to God following dharma (moral order) qualify for entrance to the heaven known as Vaikunta, the abode of Lord Vishnu. Otherwise, upon death of its associated body, the individual soul is subject to moving to another body. This cycle can continue forever, or until the soul qualifies for entrance to Vaikunta. Vishnu’s Vaikunta is full of happiness and is devoid of disease and death. It is the great end—no more births or deaths. Upon liberation, the individual soul retains its identity but becomes free of any suffering. Dvaita does not believe in liberation during one’s lifetime.

Dualists look upon themselves as servants of God. They are vegetarians on the grounds that they shouldn’t harm animals, which have souls and belong to God.

When the Dvaita speaks of God, it is referring to the avatars of Vishnu and the promise of Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita that he will manifest here on earth whenever the dharma is in decline. According to the Dvaita, God descends to earth as needed because of his love for the devotees.

Advaita

Someone saw God and asked, “Who are you?” God replied, “You.”

This brief dialogue explains the aphorism Tat tvam asi (“Thou art That”), which appears in the Upanishads, dramatizes the entire philosophy of nondualism, and summarizes all that is contained in Vedanta. Consequently, I could end the discussion right here. But to absorb all that is contained in that truth, we need to know more.

Who is Thou? What is That? How is Thou That? That, according to Advaita Vedanta, is Brahman. Thou is you. You are Brahman. You are divine. The Hindu sages proclaimed that every human (in fact every animal) is, in its essence, divine. Therefore there is no difference between the inner you and the inner me. We are the same, except that we have different bodies and different experiences. We are like passengers on a plane, all heading to the same destination.

Having pronounced that divinity is in you, the Upanishadic sages insist that you are not a sinner. Swami Shivananda Saraswathi (1887–1963), a saint who founded a religious order known as the Divine Life Society, declared that bliss is your birthright. Hindus believe that we need to enjoy life on earth while performing our duty till the end, at which time the body dies but the soul lives on.

Thou art That. If you and the next person and everyone and everything else are divine, how many divinities are there? An infinite number. Brahman contains all. If you believe you are divine (and Hindu sages say you must), your life on earth is governed by the divinity in you influencing your action, speech, and thought, all of which are divine. If everyone and everything behaved accordingly, all would be well; it would be heaven on earth, with divine actions, divine speech, and divine thoughts all around.

Is heaven on earth an unattainable dream? No, say the sages. According to them, that is what life on earth was meant to be. Thou art That. We are therefore the One. Trouble starts when we forget that inherent oneness, and the result is the imperfect world we see and live in. This, the Hindu declares, is ignorance of the Reality.

This approach lays down an ideal before us that is possible to attain: to live the divinity in us. It asks us to elevate our lives to meet that ideal and avoid the tendency to compromise it. Living the divinity within ourselves requires action that takes place amid inner calmness. This seeming conflict is insisted upon by the scriptures.

Vedanta stresses that the single most important goal of life is the realization of our true nature. We must know ourselves, know who we really are. As simple as this idea may sound, attaining self-realization is actually very hard, because we are distracted by our external focus. Such focus has undoubtedly helped humanity in many ways, such as the Green Revolution, which increased food production; the moon landing; and advances in genetics, computers, medicine, and the Internet. Yet this external engagement has also blinded us to the most fundamental need: to know who we truly are.

Although many a recent thinker has brought this lapse to our attention, it is not a new discovery. Centuries ago, Hindu sages urged, “Know thyself.” So did thinkers in other cultures. The Greek version, gnothi seauton (carved over the door to the temple of the oracle at Delphi), and the Latin nosce te ipsum all mean the same.

Hindus made a special effort to focus their attention inward for another reason: they found the inner universe equally fascinating and equally demanding as the outer universe.

The sages assured us that when we know who we really are, we will be able to assert the Truth stated in the Mahavakyas (“Grand Utterances”) this way:

Aham brahmasmi (I am Brahman).

Tat tvam asi (Thou art That).

Ayamatma brahma (The extension of the self is Brahman).

According to the sages, “I am God” needs to be understood and repeated until it becomes an integral part of every human being. This truth, which affirms the oneness of the universe, is considered the greatest truth of Advaita Vedanta. It is also Vedanta’s mandate: realize who you are.

According to Vedanta, oneness, when realized, leaves us free. With the realization of our true identity—our oneness with everything and every being—outward differences in name, color, dress, speech, station in life, and so on become less important. The path an individual chooses to realize the self and to reach God doesn’t matter. Uniformity isn’t needed, because all paths eventually lead to the same Truth, which is why Vedantists are able to declare, “Truth is One, but the wise may express it differently” (ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti).

The Hindu is not concerned about how you reach this realization. He doesn’t insist that you adopt his path; he is comfortable when you follow your own. A Hindu’s wish for you is that you be a better Christian if you are a Christian, a better Jew if you are Jewish, a better Taoist if you are a Taoist. No matter what path you choose, the Hindu believes that he will ultimately meet you when you both reach your goal.

Vedanta doesn’t care who the individual is or what the individual believes in. It asks that we develop a perspective from whose height all differences, real and important though they may seem to be, diminish until we are able to view unity, harmony, and beauty. Think of being in an airplane at 30,000 feet and looking down to see a beautiful, smooth terrain.

The core message of the Vedanta is that human beings cannot achieve happiness by mere experience of physical pleasures obtained through wealth: these are temporary and cannot last long. At best, they guarantee you another turn on the wheel of rebirth.

Vedanta aims at absolute happiness obtainable only through spiritual enlightenment. Such enlightenment alone is capable of cutting the link between endless action and the corresponding consequences. When the individual soul (jivatman) is freed from this connection, it is liberated from the cycle and unites with the source, Brahman.

As mentioned previously, one is free to follow any path one chooses to find God. In this sense, Vedanta is both a religion and a philosophy, reflected in the following Hindu prayer.

OM. Lead me from the unreal to the Real.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to eternal life
Om, peace, peace, peace.

Concluding Thoughts

At first sight, the dualism of the Dvaita appears somewhat more realistic. You are you, a human, and there is a God who loves his devotees. Worshipping that godhead, seeking his grace, and leading a spiritual life leads you to the heavenly abode. Although this sounds simple, it is not necessarily easy to practice. Total surrender with unconditional love of the Almighty still does not exclude doing one’s duty and seeking higher knowledge.

In my opinion, Advaita, nondualism, is a huge leap ahead. It asserts that you must realize who you really are. You must strive to understand yourself with a focus and depth of thought until you know who you really are. Don’t give up, it says; dive deep and realize you are IT—Brahman. Once you cross that hurdle by overcoming ignorance, you are on the threshold of heaven, even in this life. Strict spiritual observances are recommended so you become free: when the body dies, the soul merges with the Supreme Soul, and you are done. No more rebirths and deaths, no more disease, no more struggle, no more conflicts. Your soul has reached its real home.

Heaven on earth will be the result if everyone reaches that state where they enjoy life on earth, with every action, thought, and utterance within the framework of dharma.

Has any human being ever been able to attain this goal? Yes, although the list is not long.

My spiritual hero, the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, who, while addressing the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893, began his speech with the words “Sisters and Brothers of America,” lived a life that is truly divine, yet he was a human being just like you and me. His contributions to Vedanta have influenced seekers throughout the world and will last forever. To this short list, we can add Mahatma Gandhi; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mother Teresa; Pope Francis; and perhaps a few more of your choice who have revolutionized the world by giving hope and trying to attain a more equitable and peaceful world.

The list of famous individuals who disregarded every conceivable dictum and brought destruction to the world is long, and you have been reading about all of them in history. That, unfortunately, is the real, messy, cruel, dangerous world. It need not be, but humans tend to rush towards a nearby pile of coal while the pot of gold is just within reach. Every individual is important, and the choice that individuals make can influence the whole world.

That choice is yours, and yours only. Realize!

Dr. A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan is the author of many publications, including the books Vedic Wedding: Origins, Tradition, and Practice (which received a national best book award in 2007), A Hindu Primer: Yaksha Prashna (which won a Benjamin Franklin Award in 2016), and Hinduism for Dummies. His website is www.avsrinivasan.com.

The Current State of Unbelief

Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Huff, Peter A. "The Current State of Unbelief" Quest 110:2, pg 20-24

By Peter A. Huff

Peter A Huff Unbelief has no president, pope, or CEO. Many people speak as unbelievers, but no one speaks for unbelief as a whole. To understand the phenomenon today, we have to investigate a broad spectrum of interrelated dimensions of life.

The evidence, from shifting demographics and moral sensibilities to the latest publications and trends in social media, suggests that unbelief in its many forms is a cardinal feature of our time. From all accounts, the current state of unbelief is vibrant, increasingly visible, rapidly evolving, and complex.

Atheism and agnosticism, to name two familiar types of unbelief, are essential ingredients of contemporary experience. Without them, everything we call modern (and postmodern) would be different, perhaps unrecognizable. The entire modern project, springing from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolves around freedom: freedom to question authority, reject oppressive institutions, and invent new ways of constructing selfhood, organizing community, and pursuing happiness. Atheism, agnosticism, and all the variants of unbelief express these defining freedoms of the modern age: inquiry, revolution, invention. They permeate every sector of modernity—from politics, economics, and science to literature, education, entertainment, art, and even religion.

Recognizing the importance of atheism and agnosticism and cognate forms of doubt and dissent is one thing. Understanding what they are is another. Many discussions of atheism and agnosticism suffer from simplistic assumptions about the meaning of the terms and the phenomena to which they point. Atheism and agnosticism are routinely reduced to questions of belief. According to conventional wisdom, atheism is belief in the nonexistence of God or disbelief in the existence of God. Agnosticism, caricatured as timid or tepid atheism, is seen as the inability or unwillingness to believe in God’s existence or nonexistence.

These approaches tell only a fraction of the story. As intellectual shorthand, they get a conversation started. For people who identify as atheist or agnostic, they may get the conversation started in the wrong way or aimed in the wrong direction. Just as there are varieties of religious experience, there are varieties of atheist and agnostic experience. The meaning of unbelief is neither obvious nor simple.

Concentrating on belief or unbelief, in fact, contributes to distorted portraits of atheism and agnosticism. A brief review of atheist and agnostic literature reveals a number of factors shaping these distinctive outlooks and orientations: critique, defiance, disenchantment, discovery, liberation, and exhilaration, just to name a few. These themes offer not only a sense of atheist and agnostic beliefs or ideas but also a glimpse of the lived experiences that make atheism and agnosticism so multifaceted. Acknowledging that beliefs about God may not necessarily constitute the main characteristics of atheism and agnosticism is an important step toward allowing these realities to speak for themselves. Unbelief is not just about unbelief.

Language itself is a challenge when it comes to understanding atheism and agnosticism. Too often, atheism and agnosticism and their adherents have been pictured exclusively in terms of negation or lack: not believing something, not having something, not being something. A long train of synonyms with negative prefixes or suffixes reinforces this trend: unbelievers, nonbelievers, irreligious, antireligious, nonreligious, antitheist, nontheist, infidel, godless, and misotheist (“hater” of God). Even twenty-first-century nicknames such as None (as in “none of the above”) and Done (as in “done with religion”) fit the pattern. This trend goes back to the Greek basis for each word: átheos (a + theós = “without god”) and ágnostos (a + gnosis = “without knowledge”).

In ancient Mediterranean cultures, people labeled as átheos, including Socrates, promoted not a worldview antagonistic to divine beings but a critical approach to society’s unquestioned assumptions. In the first century CE, Roman pundits called Jews and Christians atheists. The allegiance to only one deity challenged the folk religions of the empire, threatened the cult of the emperor, and stumped the Roman imagination.

Once the church gained worldly power, it turned the tables and called practitioners of the older religions atheists, saying pagan gods were not gods. Three centuries later, Muslim authorities issued similar declarations. By the early modern period, Western writers and their Arab, Turkish, and Persian counterparts used words derived from átheos as all-purpose terms of abuse, not precise references to a specific point of view.

Today, any number of atheists and agnostics may capitalize on the negative charge of the root terms, defying what they take to be the oppressive nature of religion and the God idea. Some people who find religion meaningless and God a useless hypothesis, however, avoid atheist and agnostic precisely because of the negative stigmas associated with the labels. Many gravitate toward freethinker, humanist, and secularist, or the twenty-first-century neologism Bright. Some suggest that godfree may be the best way to state what appears to be a negative in a positive way.

When it comes specifically to atheism, the vast literature on the subject by atheists themselves reveals more nuanced understandings of unbelief. Some writers recognize that the God denied by atheists does not always correspond to the God affirmed by believers. Aware of the complexities within theism, they share Martin Buber’s conviction that God is the “most loaded of all words.” Others, especially since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in the nineteenth century, have endeavored to move the discussion of atheism beyond the categories of belief and reason. They portray atheism as a life orientation or the default position of the human mind, not simply a set of ideas. Atheist novelists, playwrights, artists, composers, and poets express atheism as a cluster of moods, intuitions, and sentiments. Criticism of religion and religious institutions, especially accompanied by disappointment or outrage in light of religion’s intellectual incoherence or moral failure, can be a mode of atheism. Anger at God can be a kind of atheism.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the appearance of a new class of confident advocates for secularity and nonreligion, eager to present atheism and agnosticism in a positive light. For them, these stances are far more than a nay-saying to a question of belief or a refutation of somebody else’s worldview. Phil Zuckerman, founder of the first academic secular studies degree program in the U.S., exemplifies this approach in Living the Secular Life. He maintains that atheism is not a reversal of something or a rejection of a competing viewpoint. It is a constructive, affirmative way of being in the world, based on courage and awe and yielding authenticity and contentment. Likewise, Lesley Hazleton, in Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, argues that cultivated not-knowing can be the effective basis for a life marked by intellectual adventure and generous empathy for other human beings. Questioning and questing, she claims, lead to richer ends than rigid avowal or denial can provide.

Such forthright recommendations of atheism and agnosticism have been rare in history. They are stark reminders of how new open, organized, socially active, and legally protected atheism and agnosticism truly are. Our premodern ancestors could not have imagined organizations such as Humanists International or public relations initiatives such as the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain, with its ads proclaiming “There’s Probably No God.”

The track record of atheophobia is as long as the history of atheism itself. In some countries, blasphemy and apostasy laws still inflict severe punishment on the individual who will not conform to fixed standards of belief and behavior. Even in societies with constitutional protections for free speech and conscience, outspoken atheism can wreck a career, a reputation, or a relationship.

The academic study of the history of atheism and agnosticism is in its early stages. Until the late twentieth century, it was little more than a footnote to the history of philosophy and theology. Too often it was blurred with accounts of religious heresies and other deviations from reigning orthodoxies. Greater acceptance of intellectual diversity in present-day society has fueled growing interest in unbelief’s past. Unfortunately, undisciplined quests for atheist and agnostic forebears, portrayed as pioneers or heroes, have been largely exercises in wishful thinking and anachronism.

At least three significant challenges face the historian of atheism and agnosticism. One is the convention of the periodization of history. Carving history into preconceived chapters, such as ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and the like, is still standard practice in the academy and the popular media. These titles are frequently woven into the stories of atheism and agnosticism. Freighted with assumptions that may distort more than they describe, the labels should be employed with caution and self-awareness. Referring to the intellectual innovation of highly literate male European thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the “Enlightenment” highlights that era’s revolutionary new ways of studying nature and imagining society. At the same time, “Enlightenment” grants dangerous cover for the cultivation of notions of race and progress that subsidized enterprises such as the international slave trade, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and Western imperialism and colonialism.

Another challenge to the historical study of atheism and agnosticism is, again, terminology itself. Atheism first appeared in English during the mid-1500s, initially as a term of derision, not self-description. Cambridge theologian Henry More’s Antidote against Atheisme, published in 1653, was as much about witchcraft and religious fanaticism as what people today call atheism. The word agnosticism, by contrast originally a matter of self-identification, was coined only in 1869, during the initial controversy over Darwin’s theory of evolution. These terms, while remarkably flexible, have come to be seen as relatively reliable indicators of recognizable positions or mindsets in various phases of modern history. It is a matter of debate, though, whether the terms effectively correspond to states of mind harbored by some people in earlier phases of history. If no language existed to describe the state of affairs, and especially if the danger to person and freedom was so grave that admission of atheism or agnosticism would have meant possible prison, exile, or death, how can anyone point to individuals in the premodern past, individuals lacking words or safety to speak up, and confidently identify those figures as atheists or agnostics? Could there be something peculiarly modern about unbelief itself? Is modernity the age of atheism and agnosticism? Or is the modern period one chapter in the story of these worldviews?

A third challenge to the construction of atheist and agnostic lineages is the built-in Eurocentrism of most inquiries into their backgrounds. The majority of histories of atheism and agnosticism have been written by Western writers, for Western readers, about a certain set of Western people. The standard narrative, tracing skepticism from ancient Greek suspicion about the gods to twenty-first-century North Atlantic New Atheism, tends to confirm this conclusion.

Haunting every study of atheism and agnosticism, past and present, is the question of the relationship between atheism and agnosticism and the specific styles and assumptions of Western intellectual life. Are atheism and agnosticism primarily Western phenomena? If they are, then they would appear to be among not only the most important products of the Western world’s cultural economy but also some of its chief exports. If they are not, then what are the signs of atheism and agnosticism in cultures that have not been substantially influenced by Abrahamic traditions—in cultures, that is, without a history of obsession with the concept signified by the term God? Are there compelling reasons to describe certain forms of philosophical outlook in African or Australian or American indigenous cultures, or in south or east Asian cultures, as varieties of atheism and agnosticism?

Despite the challenges, a number of historians have attempted to construct a chronicle of atheism and agnosticism stretching from ancient to modern times and around the globe. Most begin their narratives in the first millennium BCE. Few examine the full time of Homo sapiens on earth. Almost none consider the lives and strivings of other Homo species, which would extend the story of the human mind to at least 2,500,000 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that magic and religion have shaped human experience for millennia. God and gods have been relatively recent additions to human cultural life.

Depending exclusively on written evidence, many historians see possible first signs of atheism and agnosticism in India’s nontheist Samkhya philosophy or the traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, dating from around 500 BCE. Some point to folk traditions in ancient China that evolved into Daoism and Confucianism, some to systems of thought that planted the seeds for Africa’s ubuntu ethic—the humanist philosophy, often translated from Zulu and Xhosa languages as humanity toward others, which has flourished in postapartheid South Africa and many other sites of the global African Renaissance. Many scholars, writing from a Western perspective, claim to find atheist and agnostic ancestors in ancient Mediterranean nonconformists: Greeks such as Protagoras of Abdera, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Diagoras of Melos, author of On the Gods; and Romans such as Cicero, author of On the Nature of the Gods, and Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things. The difficulty with these efforts is the problem of demonstrating the connection between ancient people who thought gods irrelevant and modern people who see gods as imaginary. The quest for the world’s first atheist or first agnostic, while tantalizing, is fraught with trouble. Some critics say it is wrongheaded from the start. Atheism and agnosticism have no origins, they contend. They are names for the natural state of the human mind, as old as human existence.

The student of atheism and agnosticism is on firmer ground investigating these phenomena today. One of the most striking features of these ways of life and thought is their variety. A diversity of types of atheism and agnosticism confronts the open-minded researcher. Often the types can be grouped into pairs of contrasting forms: rational versus emotional, organic versus organized, active versus passive, naive versus sophisticated. Some unbelievers are raised in nonreligion. Some have transformations of mind along the lines of a religious conversion. Some are in the closet, some are out. Some have no argument with religion. Others wrestle with gods for a lifetime. Some insist that atheism and agnosticism have intellectual content. Others say they represent independence from all creeds, even anticreeds. Some worship science as a substitute deity. Others are suspicious of scientism. Some seek social change. Others are aloof, content with the status quo. Some are happy. Some depressed. Still others nostalgic, reluctant unbelievers mourning a lost faith. Some could not believe if they wanted to. Others, spiritually homeless, find themselves somewhere between belief and unbelief, half conscious, as Martin Heidegger put it, of the “trace of the fugitive gods.” André Comte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality evokes an unbelief bordering on mysticism.

Forms of everyday unbelief include the methodological atheism that reigns in the natural sciences (evident every time researchers assume that no supernatural force will influence their experiments) and the pragmatic atheism displayed in religious communities (when, as the saying goes, people pray as if everything depends on God and act as if everything depends on them). Religion also houses more profound strains of atheism. Atheists can be found in foxholes, of course, but they can also be found in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and covens. Jewish atheists are relatively uncontroversial, especially since the Holocaust. Christian atheists less so, even after the rise of “death of God” theologies in the 1960s. Harvard philosopher George Santayana communicated his unique brand of Catholic atheism with the memorable line “There is no God, and Mary is his mother.” Islam, still coming to terms with the Enlightenment legacy, has yet to reckon fully with what Walter Lippmann dubbed the acids of modernity.

One issue that illustrates the diversity within contemporary unbelief is morality. Critics wonder how unbelievers can be responsible without religion. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil fueled such suspicions, as did the widely quoted comment by a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Some atheists embrace hedonism, rejecting all values except the pursuit of pleasure. Others believe in moral relativism, understanding morality as an invention of society, constantly evolving. A significant number of atheists believe that reason and science can lead to universal ethical principles that religious and nonreligious people can share. Good without God by Harvard’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein represents the current state of this conversation within atheist circles. A body of self-help literature, by atheists for atheists, focuses on issues such as life-cycle ceremonies and parenting. Today, atheists are active in campaigns for racial justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of conscience, science education, and environmental justice.

A notable feature of contemporary unbelief is the growing prominence of women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Independent LGBTQ+ voices include Camille Beredjick, author of Queer Disbelief, and Greta Christina, author of Coming Out Atheist. Eminent figures associated with what Candace Gorham has called the “Ebony Exodus” from religion include Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers Inc., and Sikivu Hutchinson, author of Humanists in the Hood. African American atheists, agnostics, and Nones of all genders represent a visible and vocal dimension of twenty-first-century nonreligion.

As it turns out, counting these diverse individuals around the world is becoming less daunting. More social scientists are specializing in the study of nonreligion. More atheists and agnostics are feeling safe enough to speak up. Nomenclature, however, remains a challenge, distinguishing between atheist and agnostic, humanist, secularist, and freethinker—terms often used interchangeably by the same person.

Self-declared atheists are easiest to quantify. Some estimates place the worldwide atheist population at 500–700 million. Others set it closer to one billion, making unbelief the third or fourth largest “faith” in the world. Factoring in covert atheists would raise the number significantly. Nations reporting the highest percentages of people who identify as atheists, all in double digits, include China, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Australia, Iceland, Belgium, and Denmark.

In the United States, the many forms of nonreligion are rapidly growing. According to the Pew Research Center, from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of adults who identify as atheists doubled, from 2 percent to 4 percent. Agnostics increased from 3 percent to 5 percent. People with no religious affiliation, the so-called Nones, grew from 12 percent to 17 percent. By 2019, over one quarter of the U.S. adult population claimed no religion—an unprecedented moment in the history of a country still described by some as Christian. All studies indicate that the highest rates of unbelief and nonaffiliation are among young adults. Even the most sober analysts are forced to imagine a soon-to-be majority American population for whom the national motto “In God We Trust” is not only a relic of the past but a bewildering and insulting one at that.

All of which confirms that unbelief has enormous social, political, and cultural consequences, especially, as Michel Onfray, author of Atheist Manifesto, has said, “when private belief becomes a public matter.” The growing visibility and normality of unbelief, broadly defined, affect everything we do—from the way we raise children and configure our calendars to the way we relate to our planet and respond to someone who sneezes. Especially at stake is the definition of the good life, not to mention the all-consuming question of truth. Perhaps options for all humans throughout the storied past of the species, atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of unbelief have intimate ties to modernity and the yearning for freedom at the heart of the conflicted Enlightenment project. The current state of unbelief is vast, multivalent, and unprecedented.

Peter A. Huff teaches religious studies and directs the Center for Benedictine Values at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. The author or editor of seven books, he is active in interfaith and intercultural dialogue. This essay draws from his recently released book, Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues (ABC-CLIO, 2021).

Patterns of Connection: An Interview with Fritjof Capra

Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Patterns of Connection: An Interview with Fritjof Capra" Quest 110:2, pg 14-19

By Richard Smoley

We make up boundaries and objects, but reality is fluid and always changing.

We have heard endless amounts about Taos and Zens of physics and everything else; they have become clichés today. This was not the case in 1970, when Fritjof Capra published his groundbreaking (and much imitated) work The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, paving the way for a new worldview. Since then, the book has sold over a million copies. Other works of his include The Turning Point; The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems; Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People; and The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance.

The essence of Capra’s thought is what he calls the systems view of life, and he has pursued and promoted it in the past fifty years. This perspective is meant to replace the old (but still prevalent) mechanistic worldview, which views objects and living things as isolated elements interacting in a more or less automatic way. Capra’s view holds that everything is interconnected and is best understood as a system of interrelated, constantly shifting, living processes.

In 2021, Capra published Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades, which traces his thought from the earliest days to the present. Essays include “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Reflections on the Spirit and Legacy of the Sixties”; “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics”; “The New Physics as a Model for a New Medicine, Psychology, and Economics?”; and “The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systemic Analysis.”

In October 2021, I conducted a Zoom interview with him to discuss his new book.

Richard Smoley: Let me start with a question that my eleven-year-old son asked me last night: is reality there when no one is looking?

Fritjof Capra: That’s pretty profound for an eleven-year-old.

Actually, this is part of the new systemic understanding of life that I have explored and synthesized for the last thirty or forty years, and which I call the systems view of life. I have published several books about that, and my grand synthesis is published in a book with that title: The Systems View of Life, coauthored with Pier Luigi Luisi. This book is related to Patterns of Connection, which represents the evolution of my thinking over five decades.

In response to your son’s question: we have discovered that if nobody is looking, reality is still there, because it’s independent of the observer. What happens with the human mind, or the process of knowing, is that we bring forth a world.

Wherever there is life, we find this cognitive dimension. For example, when we look at a tree, we know that a bird or an insect looking at the same tree will see something quite different. Even if we, say, were to have a couple of glasses of whiskey and look at the tree, we would see something different, because our mind would be influenced by the alcohol.

There is an existing world out there—I’m not saying that we made it up—but the way we divide the world into patterns and structures and parts depends on our process of observation, so we bring forth a world. If nobody were there, there wouldn’t be objects, patterns, and things as we define them in the process of knowing. It’s quite a complex issue.

Smoley: One fundamental theme that pervades your thought and your book is this: “In order to maintain themselves effectively, living organisms must be able to discriminate between the system itself, as it were, and its environment. This is why all living organisms have a physical boundary.”

That certainly makes sense in light of what you’re saying, but could one also say that about the supposedly inanimate world, since all things have physical boundaries? Does the electron have some kind of capacity to distinguish between self and other, even though it would be in a form that is radically different from our own?

Capra: I don’t know whether “distinguish” is the right word, because as far as we know, there are no mental processes going on in electrons or atoms, whereas, linking the mental or cognitive process to the process of life, we can specify, say, how a bacterium distinguishes between a greater and a lesser concentration of sugar. Mind, or cognition, requires a certain complexity. That complexity arises with the living cell, which is the smallest unit of a cognitive system, of a living system.

Smoley: Very good; thank you. You discuss Hinduism and Buddhist thought in your book and relate them to current scientific discoveries. Yet one of the basic insights of Hinduism and Buddhism is the concept of delusion—avidya, maya, whatever you want to call it—the idea that this cognition of ours is somehow defective. How do you integrate that idea into your system?

Capra: I will relate this exactly to what we were talking about before. There is a material world, which we don’t make up. I would say from the scientific point of view that we introduce the division of reality into objects and events, and that would be the maya.

I should also say that in my collection of essays, spirituality forms sort of a set of bookends. I begin with my interest in Eastern spirituality in the 1960s, as well as the parallels I discovered between modern physics and the basic ideas of Eastern mysticism. At the end of the collection, I end with a reassessment of my view of science and spirituality, so this is a very important dimension of my work. Spirituality is always an underlying dimension to my whole work.

Smoley: What you say makes sense: we construct reality as we understand it through our cognition. But to pursue this line of thought, these Eastern systems say not only that our perceptions are delusory, but that we can go further to a true or accurate understanding of the world beyond these categories; this is called enlightenment. How does this fit into your system?

Capra: The way I read mystical traditions, they are saying that we can experience a true understanding, but when we express it in words, we are always limited. In the Chinese Taoist tradition, for instance, the Tao Te Ching opens by saying, “The Tao that can be expressed is not the real Tao”—Tao meaning the ultimate reality.

This is the bedrock of my comparison between modern physics and Eastern spiritual traditions: they are both empirical. These disciplines are based on observation and experience, and they both say that whenever that experience is expressed in words, we have limitations. The deeper we go into the nature of reality, the more severe these limitations become.

Smoley: Still, what these traditions seem to be saying is not that it’s simply a matter of being ineffable or inexpressible in words, but that our minute to minute cognition—the way we experience the world on a day-to-day, moment to moment basis—is somehow flawed.

The classic Advaita metaphor tells us that we are like a man who sees a rope and thinks it’s a snake. So this illusion is not merely a matter of expressing something in words, but of what we see moment by moment.

Capra: From the point of view of cognitive science, which is a whole new interdisciplinary field, we perceive the world in a certain way: we make up the boundaries; we make up the objects and events. And of course we don’t just do this individually, but culturally, because we’re all bound together by linguistic and cultural tradition and tradition. We make up these boundaries and these objects, but reality is fluid and always changing. We tend to hang on to objects, fixed ideas, and fixed categories instead of realizing this fact. This is the most profound insight of the Buddha and of the whole Buddhist tradition.

Smoley: Let me turn to a different question, which has to do with particle physics. My background is in the humanities, I have no scientific training, but, as I understand it, at one point there were believed to be atoms that were supposedly indivisible. Then they were divided into protons, electrons, and so on. Later, these were divided into still simpler particles, known as hadrons, quarks—whatever the terms are. In your book, you mention one of the latest theories, which is string theory. It says that subatomic particles are composed of vibrating strings in a bizarre nine-dimensional space.

So what are these strings supposed to be made of? Is there something that makes them up in turn, and so on? Is this an infinite regress, or are you going to end up with some fundamental particle, like the indivisible atoms of Democritus?

Capra: It seems to be an infinite regress, although the strings are very abstract. They are mathematical vibrating structures that are not material. The activity, the vibration, involves certain patterns of energy which, according to Einstein and relativity theory, are equivalent to certain masses. String theory is a very elegant theory that says at this level of abstract strings, everything is self-consistent: there is a fundamental vibration in the universe that creates the various patterns, which then manifest as subatomic particles.

The problem is that it’s not a proper scientific theory, because it doesn’t explain the observed quantities in the subatomic world. Also there’s not just one string theory; there is a whole range. You can vary the parameters and get different theories, and you can’t decide which one is the most accurate. Still, its elegance is compelling, and that’s why most particle physicists today are working in this world of string theory.

Smoley: I’d like to move on to something slightly different, which goes back to an essay in your book that I believe was written in 1982. In it, you say that these holistic perspectives need to be brought into other disciplines, such as medicine, psychology, and economics.

Again speaking as a layman, I see nothing like this in those disciplines. Medicine seems as fragmented, or more fragmented, than ever. Psychiatry has basically become a matter of prescribing drugs. So to what extent has this vision been realized? Am I missing something?

Capra: No. I actually address this question in the epilogue of the book. I say that after five decades, it is fair to ask, has this paradigm shift, which I have written about and promoted during my whole professional life, actually happened?

The answer I come to is that it is not a smooth transition.

In various disciplines at different times, it has happened in various countries and regions of the world to different extents. Even in those places, there have been backswings.

To describe this situation, I use the metaphor of a chaotic cultural pendulum. I go through the various phases of this pendulum from the counterculture of the 1960s to the New Age, ecology, and feminist movements of the 1970s, then to the rise of Green politics and the Gorbachev phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, there was the so-called peace dividend. We were all very excited, saying, “Now we can really change our economic system. We don’t need all these military expenses.” Of course, today military expenses are vastly higher than they were then.

Finally, there was the information technology revolution, the new global economics, based on electronic networks, a new global capitalism, and a countermovement in the rise of a new global civil society, so the answer is not straightforward.

You can say that, yes, medicine is still very fragmented, but on the other hand, there is a lot of a more holistic or systemic approach to health and health care. For instance, I have a general practitioner to whom I go regularly; I have known him for twenty or thirty years. He prescribes herbal teas to me. He gives me a full standard medical checkup, but he is very preventive, and he actually has on his business card that he practices preventive medicine. So there are two parallel movements. There’s a huge popular movement around healthy eating and healthy living.

In the academic world, most of our big universities are still committed to a fragmented view. They find it very hard to overcome it, because the university departments and scientific journals are structured that way. Academic degrees and tenure tracks remain fragmented, but on the other hand, there are smaller universities and colleges, and pockets in larger universities, where they teach a more systemic, holistic view.

Two trends that are quite obvious today have helped the breakthrough of the systemic view. One is that people in all fields realize that we live in a complex world. Secondly, people realize that networks are extremely important, especially young people, who live in social networks in their day-to-day world. They find it natural to talk about complexity, systemic networks, and systemic thinking. I find that very hopeful.

Smoley: One area that seems to have retrogressed in the last forty years is psychology, not only as an academic discipline, but in terms of the mental health of Americans, which is probably worse than it’s ever been. Clinical psychology cannot be blamed for that, but it doesn’t seem to be helping very much. Do you see any breakthroughs in psychology that will help deal with this epidemic of mental illness in America?

Capra: I haven’t followed the field in detail in recent years, but I heard a lecture some time ago by Dan Siegel, who is a psychologist and neurologist in Los Angeles, and he says the same thing. He advocates an integrative vision.

Smoley: It seems that psychology has hit a wall in focusing on individuals. It seems there’s been fairly little work done on mass psychology: how people think as a mass, both as a mob in the street and as a social network community. It has always seemed to me that this needs to be understood a lot better before even individual psychology can progress. This fits into your idea of a systems way of thinking, so I’m wondering if you have any observations along those lines.

Capra: I agree with you that it’s extremely important to get some clarity about cultural and social dynamics, especially in politics today. We have populist political leaders arising in several countries who notice the malaise of the population, which in many countries is suffering from the effects of economic globalization and the maldistribution of wealth—the systematic shift of wealth from the poor to the rich. A population suffering from such economic effects is very susceptible to those manipulations. To study those from a systemic point of view, I think, would be very important, but I am not aware of any such study.

Smoley: Another question that comes up in people’s minds these days is a real or imagined revival of fascism. You grew up in postwar Austria, so you saw the effects of that much more immediately than, say, someone like me. Do you see fascism arising again as any serious threat?

Capra: Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. The most extreme version of this populism is fascism, and there are a lot of fascist elements in populist politics. You could say that various radio shows of the far right are almost like the propaganda ministry of the Nazis.

Now the situation is by no means as extreme, and I think our democratic institutions today are much stronger than they were in Austria and Germany in the 1930s, so I’m not worried about it, but I think that the tendencies are definitely there.

There are two trends, focusing on two problems: the climate catastrophe and economic inequality. The two are also linked, so I see a very interesting connection.

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had a creative idea of pinpointing social injustice and economic inequality by saying we are the 99 percent and the superrich are the 1 percent. This has had any number of political repercussions since then. To me, this is very hopeful, because it shows that a grassroots movement with the right values, which is often pooh-poohed as not being effective, has in fact had a tremendous influence.

Smoley: In the economic sphere, you have mentioned thinkers like E.F. Schumacher, who have attempted to integrate a holistic systems approach into economics. How do you see this influence pervading economic thought these days, or do you observe it at all?

Capra: I have written quite a lot about economics in these essays. I see something that is almost incomprehensible: the persistence of economists, and also of corporate and political leaders, in this illusion that unlimited economic growth is possible on a finite planet. This is irrational, yet it is pursued by almost all political and corporate leaders and economists.

Together with my colleague Hazel Henderson, I advocate a shift from purely quantitative and differentiated growth to qualitative growth, because that’s what happens in nature. Growth is obviously an essential part of life, but in nature, not everything grows all the time. While certain parts of an organism or ecosystem grow, others reach maturity and decline. This integrates and liberates their components, which become resources for new growth. I call it qualitative growth to distinguish it from GDP [gross domestic product] growth, which is promoted by our economists.

This shift is happening: there is a European organization called Beyond GDP and various other organizations that promote different economic indicators, but it’s still a minority view.

Smoley: I think of the announcement made in 2019 by the Business Roundtable in a double-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, according to which corporations were now going to consider the interests of “stakeholders”—everyone affected by their activities—instead of just the shareholders.

Capra: Yes, I was very excited about that, but subsequently not much happened; it seems it fizzled out.

Smoley: Let’s go on to something more personal. How does someone go about integrating some of these principles into their own daily life?

Capra: The first step would be to educate yourself. When you speak of integrating those principles into your lives, I would ask which principles? Educate yourself to really know what an ecological view and a systemic view means.

I have mentioned The Systems View of Life, my 500-page textbook. I also teach a course about the systems theory of life, which is known as the Capra Course. I’ve been teaching it now for six years, and I have an alumni network around the world of over 2,000 people. They discuss precisely how to integrate this view into your lives.

I would say the good news is encapsulated in the bad news, because our crisis is so multifaceted that it doesn’t really matter where you start. Whatever you do, you can change your way of life. If you are a teacher, you can teach differently; if you’re an architect, you can do architectural design differently; if you are a greengrocer, you can sell different kinds of fruits and vegetables and connect with organic regenerative agriculture; if you are a doctor, you can practice medicine differently.

No matter what activity or profession you are in, you can involve yourself in this change of paradigms from the fragmented, mechanistic view to the holistic, systemic view. It’s so broad and deep that you can start anywhere; you can just start recycling or invigorating your local community.

I would also say to people, you’re not alone; there are already thousands and thousands of grassroots organizations that are involved in this project. My colleague Paul Hawken has written a book called Blessed Unrest, in which he portrays numerous grassroots organizations. You can just go on the Internet, type in the area you want to look at and the region you live in, and you will find an organization pursuing precisely what you’re seeking in your area: it’s that widespread today.

Smoley: Apart from involving oneself in these groups, could you say how this works in terms of practical day-to-day ethics? How does, or should, this outlook affect people’s day-to-day ethical behavior?

Capra: It does, absolutely. It affects the way you live, your daily life. When you go shopping or post a letter, do you drive, or do you walk or bicycle? Do you take a paper bag from your supermarket, or do you have a cloth shopping bag? How are you dealing with your own health and nutrition? How are you dealing with your community? Do you have a local community of neighbors that you can rely on for mutual support? It affects all aspects of daily life.

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