Quest Magazine

Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ecstasy and Light

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wadlow, René . "Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ecstasy and Light" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 22-23

By René Wadlow

The compo Theosophical Society - René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf. ser Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) was a key figure in what is commonly called the Silver Age in Russian history (from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I in 1914). This era saw a surge of interest in mysticism and in the occult and philosophical teachings of India and China, along with influences from Germany, including the thought of Nietzsche and the Christianized version of Theosophy developed by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner’s second wife, Marie von Sivers, was a Baltic Russian. She helped spread Steiner’s views in Helsinki and Warsaw, cities in close contact with Russian intellectual circles.

One element of Theosophical thought, especially in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which Scriabin read closely, was the idea of esotericism — hidden or secret knowledge which passes from age to age and from country to country. This hidden knowledge is taught in small inner circles or can be discovered through a careful study of the literature and the development of the individual’s higher consciousness by meditation. For Scriabin, music of certain sorts had the power to open the door to this hidden and transformative knowledge. (For a Theosophical assessment of Scriabin’s music, see Cyril Scott’s book, cited below.)

Scriabin came from an aristocratic Russian family. His father was a diplomat who was usually posted abroad and had little contact with his son. Scriabin’s mother was a well-known concert pianist but died when Scriabin was only one year old. He was raised by his father’s sister and mother, both of whom were musicians. As Scriabin showed an interest and talent for music, he started to learn the piano at an early age with a teacher who was also teaching the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. The two students became lifelong friends, and Rachmaninoff did much to promote Scriabin’s piano works after the latter’s early death at the age of forty-three.

Scriabin followed the classic Russian path for musicians, going to the Moscow conservatory, and at an early age he married another young pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich. Like many Russians of that time and class, they decided to travel abroad, and so from 1904 to 1909, they lived in Paris and spent time in London, Brussels, and the U.S. In 1907 in Paris, Scriabin collaborated with the producer Sergei Diaghilev to introduce Russian music, dance, and art to the French artistic milieu.

Scriabin found time to produce four children with his wife, as well as taking a second “wife,” Tatyana Schloezer. Finally Vera agreed to a divorce, and Tatyana became his legal wife. They had three children. In addition to music, Scriabin believed that sex was an avenue to secret knowledge. At the time in Theosophical circles there was a good deal of interest in the awakened kundalini, the serpent fire, said to be coiled at the base of the spine. With proper breathing exercises and meditation, the serpent can rise up to the Third Eye between the brows and then to the crown of the head, producing enlightenment and liberation from matter. Scriabin used yogic breathing exercises to work with the kundalini. One problem — which did not occur with Scriabin alone — is that the fire often rises from the base of the spine but only reaches as far as the sex organs and stays there. Later, in the period between 1930 and 1940, when Scriabin’s music was considered to be out of line with officially favored school of Socialist Realism, it was attacked for “its unhealthy eroticism.” Scriabin’s life was given as proof that his music stimulated sex and took the workers’ minds off production goals. Today, with Russia’s fast-declining birth rate, there seems to be a strong revival of interest in Scriabin’s music.

Alexander Scriabin

One of Scriabin’s most explicitly Theosophical-spiritual compositions, following concepts put forward in The Secret Doctrine, is Prometheus: Poem of Fire. In the usual account of the myth, Zeus has the titan Prometheus make humans out of mud. Prometheus, taking pity on the condition of the creatures he created, steals fire from heaven and gives it to them. Zeus punishes Prometheus by having him bound to a rock, although he is eventually freed by Hercules.

In Scriabin’s Theosophical retelling, Prometheus does not steal the fire but is given it consciously by Zeus in order to produce “the ray of light” in humans. Thus Prometheus is like Lucifer, the “light bringer” who imparts the mind with the capacity to understand the causes of progress and regression. In this version Zeus does not punish Prometheus. Instead, being bound to a rock is a symbol of the difficulties on the spiritual path, the progression of spirit through matter, to return liberated as spirit, but at a higher degree of evolution at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.

In the Soviet Union and even in today’s Russia, Scriabin’s music has been treated as music largely separate from his philosophical ideas. In 1922, after the end of the Russian Civil War, when the Soviet government could start thinking about culture, Scriabin’s Moscow apartment was made into a state museum and kept in the condition it was in when he was alive, with his esoteric books visible in the library. Except for the 1930–40 period — the harshest time of Stalin’s repression — Scriabin’s music has been played continuously in Russia. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was orbiting in his craft in 1961, Russian radio sent up the music of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, which became a kind of theme song for the flight after Gagarin landed.

The spiritual foundation of Scriabin’s music is no longer unknown in Russia, but it is not stressed either. As is often the case, esoteric knowledge remains esoteric. With a knowledge of the spiritual quest, one can hear his music with different ears.

René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf.

Suggested Reading

Carlson, Maria. No Religion Higher than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Rosenthal, Bernice G., ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Scott, Cyril. Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1958.

Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 18-21.

By John Shirley

Because it flashed upon me with a sudden horror that you were dead already — long ago.

—Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken

Theosophical Society - John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His novel Doyle after Death was reviewed in Quest, fall 2014. His article “The Apocalypse of Consciousness” appeared in the same issue. I was walking through “the yard” at San Quentin State Prison. The prisoners sunning themselves at tables near the worn baseball field would have pleased any casting director with their do-rags and the homemade prison tattoos on muscular bare arms. The man walking with me, though, was smallish, balding, middle-aged, and pale, making me think of an accountant. He might once have been an accountant, I don’t know; I do know he was a convicted murderer.

I was a volunteer, teaching writing to inmates. My companion had written a script, which was about a man driven by his origins to do bad things, but with something higher struggling to emerge in him. I asked, “You have sports, television, work, time to walk freely within the walls — and you’ve been here since 1978. Do you stay so busy you forget, for a while, that you’re incarcerated, and just feel like this is normal life?”

He told me that if he kept busy, he could “sort of” forget. But he added that he could never really forget he was in prison. “You try not to think about it too much, but . . .” He looked at the armed guard strolling by. “There are constant reminders. It’s always there. You feel it.” Even at the best times, the defining negativity of his situation loomed in the background, casting barbed-wire shadows.

Unsurprisingly, the group of inmates composing screenplays often wrote, indirectly, about people who were trapped in some way. And it’s not surprising when screenwriters and authors, moving “freely” in the outside world, write about their own existential conditions, and spiritual conditions, even when they might suppose themselves to be writing about something else entirely.

When I saw the film The Invasion (2007), I remembered that day volunteering in prison. Starring Nicole Kidman, The Invasion is the second remake of the classic science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, the Body Snatcher movies portray an isolated town in the grip of an invisible alien invasion. The invaders take over the bodies of locals, making them, one by one, into cold-hearted players in an extraterrestrial conspiracy. Your wife and your father still look like your wife and father, and talk like them. But it’s not them anymore; they’ve become numb biological robots. Key to The Invasion — it’s even in the trailer — is the admonition “Don’t fall asleep!” Because, the film warns, it’s when you’re asleep that your body is snatched. In his essay for Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute, Parabola editor Jeff Zaleski observes:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers poses a terror that is fundamentally spiritual: the loss of that special something that makes us human . . . Yet the story also offers a metaphor for a less obvious but more insidious threat . . . It’s well known but rarely discussed that the world’s five major religions teach another fundamental truth about the human condition . . . that we spend our lives mostly in a dreamlike state — lost in our thoughts, so lost in our thoughts that we are cut off from the sensation of our bodies and full awareness of the real world. This teaching can be found in the esoteric branches of each major religion.

Both Finney’s novel and the Body Snatcher movies may have been intended more as political than spiritual metaphor. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1956, an era charged with a fear of communists supposedly bent on turning our world into a godless dictatorship of the proletariat. But political themes may mask deeper insights. A look at The Invasion and other films suggests that many popular films are actually unconscious (or only partly conscious) expressions of esoteric truths. Metaphors for spiritual conditions are found in unlikely places — but they are found persistently because, like the man who “kept busy” in San Quentin, we all know, on some level, that we’re in prison. We know, too, that there’s a possibility of freedom just on the other side of a certain wall.

Despite our straitjacketed condition, something in us senses that we’re asleep and struggles, at times, to wake up. Even when we haven’t encountered esoteric teachings, we know something’s wrong: that we are living in a twilight world, where the light is too dim; that we are driven by drivers we cannot see. This unconscious, uneasy half-comprehension of our condition finds expression in popular art — especially in theater, film, and fiction.

Consider the plays of Samuel Beckett. In his unnerving, austere productions, characters walk about in purgatorial loops, repeating nightmarish scenarios, seeming caught up in entrapping states of mind. They battle for dignity, for some eking out of individuality. In Beckett’s short play Catastrophe, two ruthlessly officious, controlling individuals, a “director” and his secretary, set about arranging, as if toying with a wire framework, a miserable-looking, ragged old man frozen on a stage. At the end, the old man, against directions, lifts his head, and looks up at the audience — a tiny act of defiance. It’s all he can manage, so controlled is he by outside forces. Beckett spoke of his plays as “objects,” and probably wasn’t consciously making a spiritual statement. But again and again he poignantly expressed man’s condition: trapped, mechanical, struggling to emerge from a puppet’s purgatory.

Television has its moments of inadvertent insight into our trapped, sleeping condition: going back a ways, one of the most popular television antagonists was the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg is all one being, made up of lesser beings, a cyborgian fusion of man and machine that assimilates individuals, overriding their free will and turning them into mindless components of an artificial Archon. Besides dramatizing mindless subjection to automaticity, the Borg may be a parable of our fear of becoming disastrously dependent on the electronic and digital superstructure of our smartphone-dominated culture.

Popular film resounds with themes that speak of our tendency to lapse into sleep when we think we’re awake. One of the most striking examples is The Matrix (1999). Starring Keanu Reeves, The Matrix is about a man who discovers that the entire human world is asleep and dreaming, kept that way by enslaving artificial intelligences. Human beings are so controlled by computers they become seamlessly blended into the digital world. A rebel leader has liberated a cadre of revolutionaries, one of whom makes a secret deal with the artificial intelligences: he will betray the rebels if he can be allowed a fabricated dream life of his own choosing. The traitor may represent the inner resistance a seeker feels when presented with the possibility of awakening.

Numerous films point to the same truths with a timeliness and convergence of intent that somehow make them part of an inadvertent “movement” in cinema. I’m thinking particularly of American Beauty, Fight Club, Dark City, eXistenZ, Mulholland Drive, The Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life, S1m0ne, The Island, The Invasion, and Inception.

Sam Mendes’s 1999 film American Beauty, written by Alan Ball, is the story of a dysfunctional family lost in the centerless maze of modern life. Kevin Spacey’s character can’t touch his wife in any way that matters; he can’t reach his daughter, though she’s right in the same house with him. He has an encounter with a pot-dealing young bohemian who moves in next door — whose obsession with the innate visual beauty of the ordinary world seems an adventure in perception — and is inspired to wrestle his way free of his middle-class funk. The overall impression is of a man recognizing that he’s been asleep, dreaming his way through an air-conditioned, wall-to-wall-carpeted misery — who had forgotten the choices, the almost infinite ways out, that life offers to the wakeful in every single second of existence. As a side note, Ball’s television series Six Feet Under (2001–05) — about a family of morticians, each episode’s prologue dramatizing the death of a client — might be regarded as an oblique reminder of the importance of living consciously in the moment, with death always in the offing.

In David Fincher’s visceral Fight Club (1999), characters desperate for connection to something real go to Twelve-Step groups for problems they don’t have, just to feel emotions by proxy. They are so desperate to rid themselves of existential numbness that they start a fight club, where ordinary people meet in secret to beat each other bloody. It isn’t the violence they want — it’s the return to realness in the moment, brought about by powerful, unavoidable living contact. They allude to a society caught up in consumerism and corporate striving, dumbfounded by masks and celebrity worship and empty recreation, and they recognize that it’s all a kind of sleepwalking, a hypnotic state that must be struggled with, even battered with bare fists.

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998) is a stylish noir fantasy, a Gnostic fable about a man who finds himself on a search for truth and identity in a shape-shifting city that turns out to be a living urban stage designed for sinister, arcane purposes by malignant entities. All may be a dream — or may not.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) involves a virtual-reality videogame that — like so many Philip Dick–influenced tales — makes us wonder where reality ends and the game begins. Fantasy and reality inevitably overlap in this film. There are anti-game revolutionaries in the background, and the game’s player wonders what’s real, and if the game could be a game within a game . . .

In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a young actress seems to have her soul, or identity, stolen by evil forces embedded in the city of Los Angeles (no one who’s worked in The Business there needs much convincing) as she goes through an enigmatic quest to find her real nature — in what turns out to be, apparently, a dream.

In Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey’s character discovers he’s in a false reality, literally staged by people who are using him as entertainment and have done so for a generation. He must find the confines of the staging area and break out into the real world, to find actual love, an unscripted destiny.

Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) was inspired by a 1997 Spanish film called Open Your Eyes. This Tom Cruise vehicle once again gives us a hero who by degrees realizes that his nightmarish reality is fabricated, intricately computer-animated, and transmitted into his brain, which is in modified cryogenic freeze. He chooses to wake up and face the real world of a dark future rather than accepting the comforting dreams the cryogenics company offers him.

Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) — an intriguing innovation fusing conventional movie photography and animation — gives us a hero who keeps waking up from a complex dream that seems to push him into profound social and philosophical dialogues with the sundry intellectual outlaws he encounters. But each time he’s sure he’s awakened, he finds, once more, he’s only dreaming.

Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne (2002) is a comedy about a movie director who’s so disgusted with actors that he computer-generates Simone, a beautiful actress programmed with the best aspects of all the great female movie stars. The audience falls in love with her, and people refuse to accept she’s not real, even when he tries to tell them so. S1m0ne sends up the public’s willingness to collaborate with illusion on a global scale.

In Michael Bay’s The Island (2005), the hero discovers that his world, which seems to be the only refuge in a world supposedly ravaged by catastrophe, is actually a factory for creating clones used by the rich for spare parts, and the free, living world is hidden but intact and waiting for him beyond the walls of social illusion.

While The Invasion, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is less effective than the Don Siegel original, the film nevertheless dramatizes (probably unconsciously) the central dark fact of the human condition: when we allow consciousness to lapse, we surrender our ability to make choices, deferring to lower subselves and their mindless agenda.

Then there’s the Christopher Nolan film Inception (2010). Ostensibly a tale of corporate espionage — stealing some ideas and planting others in human minds through entry into their dreams — the movie can also be seen as a surreal take on the subjectivity of our normal reality. The filmmaker said he was seeking to make a coherent adventure in the world of dreams. But what if a hidden, deeper part of him was saying something more? As G.I. Gurdjieff tells us, “Life is real, only then, when ‘I am’.” Eventually the hero of Inception must find his way out of a subjective dream world, effectively learning what it is to actually be — what it is to be able to genuinely say, I am.

Whether these are great works of art is not important. What matters is the emergence of a remarkable number of films questioning reality itself — each suggesting a sinister puppeteer, pointing to a kind of dreamy disorientation prevailing in the median consciousness of the industrialized world — seems a defined cultural current, however unplanned, emerging from a consensus about our condition. What is it we’re trying to tell ourselves, with The Matrix, and all these other films on the same theme?

These filmmakers are not deliberately referring to esoteric ideas, but on some level they seem to confirm insights basic to vipassana Buddhism, certain forms of Sufism, esoteric Christianity, and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. Artists express their perception, however murky, of the human condition. And a perceptual consensus is beginning to emerge: mankind is asleep, mechanical, strictured, fragmentary.

Most everyone has had a dark dream that they struggled to wake from. A few nights ago I had a chance encounter on the street with an unbalanced stranger who claimed to have a concealed pistol. He threatened to shoot me if I got too close to his new truck. I doubted he had a gun at all, and took it in stride, shrugging it off, but deep down the encounter disturbed me. That night I dreamt I was in a crowded public square, where a belligerent man argued with me, then ran and got a large automatic pistol from his friends. The crowd watched in vague amusement as I ducked behind a car to avoid getting shot. On some level (this often happens when I have nightmares) I knew I was asleep. It took a few moments, but I somehow deliberately wrested myself out of sleep so that I wouldn’t have to dream of being shot.

My anxiety about the threatening man on the street was not unfounded in our gun-burdened society, and my dream was a way to process that anxiety. Films are like dreams; they extol the social subconscious. The films in our incomplete list are roughly along the same lines. They are cinematic dreams mulling over real dilemmas our so-called “conscious” minds are only dimly aware of. These films are external representations of inner processes: the higher part of us struggling to awaken, to warn us we’re in danger of losing our birthright.

Some of us drift through our lives like pollen; others bounce energetically from one interaction to another like the reflective silver sphere in a pinball machine. Sometimes, spurred by inner compulsions and external conditions, we imagine that we are doing great things in the world; we become reformers, or master criminals. We run for president.

But on some level, no matter what we seem to accomplish, we know that the whole time, we have been asleep. Like the people in comas who are often seen to struggle to awaken, we make feeble, indirect efforts to protest our numbness, to acknowledge that transcendence is tantalizingly near. We go to amusement parks for rocket-fast rides that thrill us into momentary contact with our bodies and the present moment; we try skydiving, bungee jumping, extreme sports. Some people go in for drugs and speak portentously of their fitful, veering experiences with altered consciousness. And filmmakers protest their sleep through movies like The Matrix, an adrenaline-pumping action movie that combines thrill seeking with the notion of our subjectivity to mechanicality and the possibility of awakening to real freedom.

These films rarely offer straightforward solutions to the dilemmas they pose. Although fight clubs do exist, the novel (by Chuck Palahniuk) and film Fight Club are actually presenting only satirical solutions — questioning the status quo — and a willingness to use desperate means for escape.

Still, The Matrix seems to symbolically suggest something like the process of self-observation found in Buddhism and the Fourth Way: the hero takes steps to wake up, only to find he’s connected to machinery that has kept him drugged, fed, and subjected to a false digital “reality.” Waking enough to see this machinery, he’s able to unplug himself from it and escape to liberation. That is, when a man really looks, really observes for himself that he is mechanical, he has the possibility of freedom from the machine.

The Invasion offers us only an alert willingness to question the apparent, and a feverish determination to find a way out of the trap at all costs. The Island’s implicit advice is essentially the same. Vanilla Sky’s hero chooses to face a harsh reality as it is — to look it square in the eye, acknowledging the painfulness of seeing what is, and intimating that in the end the discomfort is freeing.

The young actress in Mulholland Drive seems to be on a search for some lasting, essential self — something beyond the ephemeral — and Lynch hints that there’s an essence to be found, eventually. In Waking Life and eXistenZ we’re directed to question the status quo and our own assumed reality; we’re called to interrogate existence with an active mind.

In The Truman Show, Peter Weir goes farther. Question the status quo, then go on a journey, regardless of the difficulties and your own resistance, to the other side of the façade, where you’d better be willing to see not only the falseness of the staging, but your own.

There are, of course, films, like the heavy-handed but charming Tyrone Powers classic The Razor’s Edge (1946), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991), that address spiritual themes more directly. There’s also Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), a film version of Gurdjieff’s memoir of his spiritual search. In what seems a play on ideas of recurrence from Nietzsche and P.D. Ouspensky, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day is condemned to live the same life over and over again till he sees himself, finally, as he truly is — and sees the consequences of real choices. In The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges plays a vain talk-radio host who inadvertently causes a tragedy. Tormented by guilt, he has to risk all, in an act of selfish love, to escape the suffering brought on by identification. In telling the story, the scripter uses Hermetic symbols like the Grail to symbolize the path to redemption through renunciation of the ego.

But films that express the human dilemma unconsciously, like a poignant cry from a child with night terrors, somehow strike more honestly to the heart of our condition. The sudden outpouring of films that show their heroes struggling to escape confinement by the walls of sleep makes us wonder.

In my own work as a novelist, I try to walk a middle way. In my theosophical novel Doyle after Death and in my novel of “alternative apocalypse,” The Other End, I do use symbols on purpose, but I embed the symbol in story in a way that not only dramatizes, but, I hope, entertains.

But writing fiction to that end is fraught with the risk of coming off too precious, of seeming self-important and pompous. In short, it could easily become bad writing.

For me, the best approach is to engage a sense of real experience, both for myself and the reader. I try to immerse myself — and the reader — into the world of my story, without much, if any, authorial interpolation. But along the way I allow my own spiritual leanings, and important symbols, to emerge naturally from the story and its setting.

Whether it’s prose or pictures, that’s how it works best: the symbol and the story are one and the same. The symbol should emerge seamlessly from the script or the story. And what is usually symbolized, when we look around at the sense of the spiritual emerging from entertainment media, is our awareness, just hatching, that we’re not as conscious as we could be. And that realization is a call from the cosmos itself to emerge into the world of real consciousness.

When I write fiction, I feel a responsibility to call people to wake up to the human condition, to suggest our profound need to reach for higher consciousness, for true mindfulness. And when I’m calling out in that way, I’m calling to myself too. By constantly facing the subject, I’m reminded of my own tendency to give in to my resistance. I’m reminded of my proneness to fall back into seductive numbness and the dull, default level of consciousness — into pseudoconsciousness.

Like everyone else, I struggle to awaken. Writing about awakening, even through metaphor, encourages me to reach for it myself.

John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His novel Doyle after Death was reviewed in Quest, fall 2014. His article “The Apocalypse of Consciousness” appeared in the same issue.

All You Can Be: Why Positive Thinking Matters

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "All You Can Be: Why Positive Thinking Matters" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 15-17.

By Mitch Horowitz

Theosophical Society - Mitch Horowitz is vice-president, executive editor, and director of backlist and reissues at Tarcher Perigee. Mitch is the author of Occult America (Bantam) and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown). He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Salon, and Time.com. The method of positive thinking is simplicity itself: fix a goal in your mind, attempt to enter the feeling state that your aim has been achieved, and unseen agencies — whether psychological, metaphysical, or both — are said to come to your aid. Seen in this way, our thoughts are causative.

Over the past century and a half, this one simple idea has become the keynote of American life. Positive thinking underscores our political campaigns (“Yes, we can”) and advertising slogans (“Just do it”), and forms the foundation of self-help, business motivation, Twelve-Step programs, support groups, and mind-body medicine.

For all its impact, positive thinking, more properly known as New Thought, is widely disparaged in our culture. Journalists and academics often dismiss it as a philosophy of page-a-day calendars and refrigerator-magnet bromides. But most critics fail to grasp the history, impact, and effectiveness of positive thinking — all of which I explore in my most recent book, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.

While I write as a historian, my interest in positive thinking is also deeply personal. In some respects, positive thinking saved my life.

Growing Up (Not Quite) Positive

My journey into mind-power metaphysics began in my early adolescence in the late 1970s. My family made an ill-fated move from our bungalow-sized home in Queens, New York, to a bigger house on Long Island. It was a place we could never quite afford. After we moved in, my father lost his job and we took to wearing secondhand clothing and warming the house with kerosene heaters. One night I overheard my mother saying that we might qualify for food stamps. When the financial strains drove my parents to divorce, we were in danger of losing our home.

Seeking guidance, I devoured the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Talmudic guide to character called Ethics of the Fathers. These works asserted that our outlook could make a concrete difference in our lives. “Nerve us with incessant affirmatives,” Emerson wrote. “Be of good countenance,” the great rabbis intoned.

I prayed, visualized better tomorrows, and became a determined self-improver. I threw myself into attempts to earn money delivering newspapers and hauling junk to a local recycling plant. I divided my time between high school in the morning and drama classes in the afternoon. I handwrote college applications and sent letters to financial aid officers. We managed to piece together our finances and keep our home.

Positive thinking did not miraculously solve all of our problems. But I emerged from the period believing that a set of interior guideposts and principles had contributed to the solution. If my thoughts didn’t change reality, they helped navigate it. And maybe something more.

Later on in life, I grew intrigued by the example of my mother-in-law, Theresa Orr. At times she seemed to gain an additional, almost magical-seeming fortitude from affirmative-thinking philosophies. The daughter of an Italian immigrant barber, Terri received a scholarship to Brandeis University in 1959, becoming the first woman in her family to earn a college degree. In the years after, she became an associate dean at Harvard Medical School. While pursuing her academic career, she raised two daughters as a divorced and single parent, cared for an elderly mother, and sponsored members of a Twelve-Step recovery program, all from under the roof of a two-family home in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Terri devoured works of positive thinking, from the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”) to affirmations from the channeled text A Course in Miracles to pointers in positivity from Guideposts magazine. She papered the surfaces of her home — literally, from the refrigerator to the medicine chest — with business-sized cards on which she penned aphorisms such as “I can choose to be right or to be happy”; “My helping hand is needed. I will do something today to encourage another person”; and (my personal favorite) “When am I going to stop going to the hardware store for milk?” There was no question in her mind, or in my own, that injunctions to sinewy thoughts had made a difference in her life.

From my late twenties through my mid-forties, my personal search led me down many spiritual paths, and into serious esoteric teachings and traditions, including Theosophy. But New Thought, or positive thinking, always remained a part of me. As I began my adult explorations into the roots and methods of positive thinking, I experienced some kind of difference in my life, as Terri had experienced in hers. Was I imagining things? The practice of determined thought could seem so naive and simplistic. Most serious people regard positive thinking as a cotton-candy theology or a philosophy for dummies.

But I like “rejected stones” — they often hold neglected truths. Some of the leading voices in positive thinking, especially in its formative days in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had, like me, pursued many avenues of thought and religion, but returned to the concept that the greatest truths can sometimes be found in practices and ideas that are very simple, so much so that they are easy to dismiss.

Mind Pioneers

Like all widely extolled principles, from healthy eating to thrifty spending, aspiration toward positivity seems as if it has always been with us. But the concept is newer than we think. The story of positive thinking began in America with the experience of a Maine clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. In the 1830s Quimby discovered that a brightened mood helped lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. “Man’s happiness is in his belief,” Quimby concluded. The clockmaker’s insights and experiments coalesced into the movement of mental healing, which used prayer, autosuggestion, and early forms of hypnotism (then called mesmerism) to relieve illness. One of Quimby’s most dynamic students, the brilliant Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found the healing faith of Christian Science.

After Quimby’s death in early 1866, mental healing spread in popularity from New England to Chicago to California, and thousands of followers believed that some force — whether divine, psychological, or both — exerted an invisible pull on a person’s daily life. By the late 1880s, the boldest mental healers theorized that the energies of the mind could impact not only health, but also money, marriage, career and all facets of life. Their beliefs came to form the influential metaphysical movement called New Thought.

The notion of the mind as an invisible or divine force came very naturally to spiritual experimenters in the late nineteenth century. The era abounded with discoveries of unseen forces, from radio waves and electrical currents to X-rays and microbes. For a time mainstream science and avant-garde spirituality appeared united in a search to unveil the inner workings of life.

At the start of the twentieth century, philosopher William James believed that New Thought, Christian Science, and all of the new mental therapeutics — which he called the “religion of healthy-mindedness” — held such promise, and hovered so mightily over modern religious life, that it amounted to the equivalent of a Reformation on the American spiritual scene. “It is quite obvious,” James wrote in 1907, “that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.”

While no high church of positive thinking today extends across American culture, the influence of mind-power metaphysics is greater than that of any one established religion. Methods of positive thinking are espoused across the religious spectrum, from New Age spiritual centers to evangelical megaministries. Positive thinking is the unifying element of all aspects of the American search for meaning. It is, in effect, the American creed.

Positive Reforms

For all of its promise, the philosophy of positive thinking is also riddled with inconsistencies and pitfalls. Over the past two decades, I have watched some of the best people in the positive-thinking movement — that is, members of New Thought churches or positivity-based support groups — depart or distance themselves after experiencing how an ill-conceived program of affirmative thought can effectively blame sick or suffering people for their ills.

A support group leader for female survivors of sexual abuse — and someone who had spent many years within a positive-thinking metaphysical church — wrote to me in 2012. She said that she had experienced both sides of the positive-thinking equation, witnessing how survivors could ably use a program of mental therapeutics to rebuild their sense of self, but also observing the kind of burden that affirmative-thinking nostrums could visit upon those recovering from trauma. She continued:

My husband, who experienced a massive stroke at the age of 22 while in “perfect” health and working as a farm hand has also felt an ambivalence toward the positive-thinking teachings. Such an emphasis gets placed on physical healing as a manifestation of right thought that it can alienate those people living with disabilities whose healings have manifested in other, possibly non-physical, ways.

In conclusion, she wondered: “Is there room for a positive-thinking model that doesn’t include blame and single-model definitions of success?”

I take the attitude that such a model can exist. But for positive thinking to reach maturity, its followers must take fuller stock of the movement’s flaws and its need for growth. To begin with, the positive thinking movement must do more to confront — and acknowledge — the tragedies of daily life. Suffering and illness cannot be explained away solely as the result of our thought patterns. As I argue in One Simple Idea, there is no compelling reason — and very little verifiable evidence — to view life as the result of one ever-operant mental superlaw, sometimes called the Law of Attraction. People live under many laws and forces, including those of accidents, physical limitations, and mortality. Positive thinkers must jettison the idea that thoughts alone are the engine of our experience.

Acknowledging that life is composed of myriad factors and agencies does not, however, detract from the key insight of positive thinking: that our thoughts contribute “something extra” to our life circumstances — and in ways that transcend ordinary psychology. The instinct that our thoughts possess an agency of influence is borne out in a long history of clinical science and compelling personal testimony.

Indeed, positive thinking has stood up with surprising muscularity in the present era of placebo studies, mind-body therapies, brain biology research, and, most controversially, the findings of quantum physics experiments. When considered without sensationalism, more than eighty years of data emerging from quantum physics shows that the presence of a conscious observer alters the nature and manifestation of subatomic particles. These findings suggest some vital, not yet understood verity about how the mind interplays with the surrounding world.

A related phenomenon plays out in the emergent science of neuroplasticity. Scientists at UCLA have recently used brain scans to show that our thought patterns actually affect — and can alter — the physical makeup of our brains. Researchers have found that when sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) actively and sustainably redirect their thoughts away from ritualistic behaviors, they also change the neural pathways associated with OCD. A thinking cure becomes a physical cure as well.

In late 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School conducted a revolutionary “transparent placebo” study, in which sufferers from irritable bowel syndrome were told up front that they were being administered a sugar pill. Placebo studies are typically based on deception, in which a patient believes that he is receiving, or may be receiving, an actual medicine. The Harvard study participants knew they were not taking a medication but an inert substance — yet a majority reported relief. This is the first documentation that an “honest placebo” has significant effects, deepening questions about how the mind influences the body.

Developments in quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies may challenge our conceptions of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, at least as much as Darwinism challenged man’s self-perception in the Victorian age.

I believe that the contemporary positive thinking movement is poised for a greater phase of maturity and persuasiveness. But to reach that point requires those of us who care about positive thinking to:

· cultivate a sober understanding of quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies, and what they say about the mind;
· ease away from an insistence on an overreaching Law of Attraction;
· and, finally, acknowledge that thought represents one factor — albeit an extraordinary one, with deep metaphysical implications — among many others that produce our lives.

These reforms would encourage a more elastic expression of positive thinking, and would return us to the best traditions of the movement’s early days, when it saw itself in league with breakthroughs in science and medicine. It falls to our generation to continue the spiritual and psychological revolution begun by the forebears of positive thinking.

A PEN Award–winning historian, Mitch Horowitz is vice-president, executive editor, and director of backlist and reissues at Tarcher Perigee. Mitch is the author of Occult America (Bantam) and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown). He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Salon, and Time.com. His article, “The Aquarian: Ronald Reagan and the Positive Thinking Movement” appeared in Quest, summer 2014. An earlier version of the article above appeared in Venture Inward magazine.

Knowledge, Inner and Outer: An Interview with Cassandra Vieten

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "Knowledge, Inner and Outer: An Interview with Cassandra Vieten" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 10-14, 40.

By Richard Smoley

One of today’s leading institutions in consciousness studies is the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), based in Petaluma, California. Founded in 1973 by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, it sponsors research not only into ordinary states of consciousness but paranormal ones, including telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance. IONS aims to explore these areas with the same rigor that is used in other scientific disciplines. TS members may recollect a Skype interview with parapsychologist Dean Radin, senior scientist at IONS, at the 2014 Summer National Convention.

At the 2015 SNC, participants heard an address by IONS president Cassandra Vieten. Vieten, a licensed clinical psychologist, has been with the organization since 2001. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the coauthor of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life(2008) and author of Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year(2009).

I interviewed Vieten during her visit to Olcott in July 2015. Nancy Grace kindly transcribed the interview for the magazine.

Richard Smoley: One of the main missions of IONS is transformation. Could you begin by saying a little bit about what you think transformation is?

Cassandra Vieten: The Institute of Noetic Sciences is dedicated to fostering, on the largest level, a global transformation in consciousness. Transformation for us can happen on an individual level; it can happen on a level of a small group like an organization or an institution; and it can happen at a larger level of society. Take one example: there is a collective sense that when someone commits a crime, we should lock them into a cage. In general that’s agreed upon. And so I think, I wonder, if part of the work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences isn’t to challenge some of these prevailing worldviews.

Smoley: Noetic is an unusual word. What does it mean?

Vieten: Noetic is a Greek word that signifies a particular kind of knowledge: inner knowing or intuitive knowledge — when you know something is true but you don’t necessarily have external proof for it, or you don’t need external validation. William James talked about a noetic experience having a curious sense of authority. It may be inarticulate, but it still carries with it a truth. It’s the way you know that you love your children, or you know that you prefer something, and no one else could tell you that’s not true.

Then there’s the external form of knowing, which we call science, and when you put those together it’s noetic sciences, a combination of the internal way of knowing and the external way of knowing, with observation, validation, measurement, replication.

Smoley: Today as always, people have all kinds of noetic experiences. Curiously, a great deal of social energy is placed into telling people they didn’t have these experiences, or that it was just their imagination. Do you see a way of countering that?

Vieten: These experiences that we’ve been studying — precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, remote viewing, ESP, near-death experiences, encounters with multidimensional beings—these are all experiences that people report. There’s a segment of society that takes all of this for granted. They have no problem with it, but they also may not have a lot of discernment about these experiences or a lot of knowledge about how biased our perceptions can be.

Then you’ve got another segment of society that says that, by definition, this is all false and imaginary. It’s also dangerous and holds the potential to contaminate our civilization of reason and logic. Not only did this experience not happen to you, but we also don’t want you to ever talk about it, because it’s going to take us to a superstitious place. It’s like a societal PTSD after the Dark Ages.

And then there’s this middle ground, which is where noetic science walks. It’s saying, these experiences are common. They transform people’s lives. They sometimes hold knowledge that leads to innovation and invention and creativity. In fact you could argue that most of the major advances of humanity came through some sort of intuitive inspiration. So this realm of experience is worth investigating scientifically.

Smoley: Religion has traditionally talked about these areas. But religion actually plays a remarkably small role in the debate that you’re talking about. We don’t see clergymen coming out and saying they’re really interested in discoveries like yours. We don’t see even quite liberal and enlightened clergymen or clergywomen embracing this approach. In the context of your work and the institute’s work, how has your relation been with conventional religion?

Vieten: We’ve had a subsection of people who are religious, who are very interested in science and in the nexus between science and spirituality. But the vast majority, I would say, of conventional religious people have an attitude that says, we don’t need external validation, we don’t need external confirmation. The fact that you’re even using words like validation or confirmation means that you have a lack of faith that threatens our tradition.

So there’s an inherent lack of faith in scientifically investigating a topic that is supposed to be just in a spiritual domain. We did a study once on distant prayer and whether it helped surgical patients after surgery. It pissed off almost everyone. You have the skeptics and the atheists and the secular folks saying, it’s ridiculous to spend research dollars on this. Why would anyone waste money to study something so silly? And then you have the religious people saying, you can’t study God. You can’t investigate prayer. It doesn’t work like that.

And then you’ve got this group of people who say, we really should look at this in a systematic way. If you look at the range of what people have practiced for their own healing or for the healing of their loved ones, prayer is almost at the top of the list. Let’s take a look at it and see what’s going on there.

Smoley: You describe two very powerful and entrenched establishments that are hostile toward the things you’re investigating — the scientific establishment and the religious establishment. With all this opposition, what hope do you have for seeing this kind of vision better integrated into society?

Vieten: I think things are changing over time. I wouldn’t say there’s a dominant hostility anymore in these groups. I would say that there are extreme and vocal factions of the religious side and the very skeptical — the professional skeptic community. They have very loud voices, and they talk a lot.

But there’s an increasing swath of people who are very interested in all of these phenomena. They’ve had their own personal experiences, so they would like to know, was that real, was that imaginary? A lot of them are not so much against studying these things, they just didn’t know you could, and they’ve been taught throughout their training that you can’t study them. So when they find out in fact there are rigorous methods for investigating this realm of existence, a lot of them are fascinated. I would say, younger people are even more interested than older people, because they haven’t been conditioned quite as much to fear this kind of thing. So when we are talking about a research project and putting out a call for internships, we often have an enormous amount of interest from young scientists, college students, religious scholars.

Even some of the most rigid skeptics still have a lot of curiosity about this topic. In fact, with some skeptics I’ve met, the depth of their passion comes because they feel so disappointed that no one has found evidence yet. And you can still say, wouldn’t it be amazing to do this right? Let’s do it really well. They start to say, what would that look like?

My hypothesis would be that a lot of this stuff has some measurable reality. If we can’t measure it now, we will be able to in the future.

Smoley: The mainstream intellectual media and journals of thought seem so horribly biased against these ideas. I remember reading articles in The New York Review of Books about topics like this, where the writer is nakedly and grossly uninformed. Similarly I see things in The New York Times that show not only an ignorance but a willful ignorance. Do you see any of that façade cracking?

Vieten: I certainly have a number of stories that confirm what you’re talking about. We’ve submitted papers for publication on studies of precognition or mediumship. One of the reviews was quite interesting, saying, this is an excellent study with good methodology, and it solves many of the problems of previous studies in this regard, and if it was on a different topic, it would be publishable. It went on to say that publishing this article would call into question hundreds of years of scientific discovery. So we also see, as you’ve said, a knee-jerk rejection in certain fields of inquiry. When you really inquire and say, how many of these papers have you read? They say, “I haven’t read any of them, because the idea is ridiculous.” It’s not that the data or the methods don’t hold up to scrutiny.

I start to ask people, do you believe in academic freedom? Do you believe that scientists should be able to study topics that are of interest to them and seem to have bearing on people’s health and healing and well-being? And do you think those should be held to the same standards of publication as other studies? Most people say yes.

So I say, OK, how about if those studies are on ESP? Then they say, “Oh, well, we really should move the goalpost at that point, and they should have more stringent criteria, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

That’s true in a way: if you’re trying to overturn a collectively held belief with one or two papers, that would be foolish. But those papers should be published all the same. And they should be held to exactly the same criteria as biology, physics, chemistry.

Smoley: Could you tell us a little about what led you into this material?

Vieten: I grew up in a house with a father who was a biological scientist. He was a very staunch materialist and an agnostic at least—atheist probably. He used to take me to the lab after school. We would look in microscopes and use telescopes to look at the stars, and go get pond water, and all kind of things that stimulated a love of the natural world and a love of science. Even though he had that materialist perspective, he had a strong sense of mystery and wonder and awe in observing the natural world.

My mom was a therapist and was influenced by Jung and feminist symbolism and was very much a sort of inner dreamwork kind of person. So I also had an appreciation for that world. But neither was religious. We didn’t go to church or have any kind of spiritual practice at home. And as I moved into my teenage years, I thought, there must be something that we’re not seeing here. I tried going to church with a couple of friends, but I couldn’t really find anything there. I was interested in all the symbols, but that’s what they looked like to me —a lot of symbols. I wanted to know, what are these symbolizing?

I grew up in southern California. When I was an older teenager, we used to go out in the orange groves, and we had bonfires and looked at the stars. And I had a couple of experiences where I did feel this massive expansion of something, some dissolution of my boundaries.

Maybe the other clues for me were in science fiction. I loved Star Wars and the Force, and I used to go on this ride at Disneyland that was called “Adventures in Inner Space.” You shrink, shrink, shrink down into a snowflake, and you’re traveling through the atoms. I recently looked up the script for this ride and it said, “There was an entire universe in the atom.”

I took a class in Buddhism in college, and I thought, now this is a religion, this is something I can understand. So I started practicing meditation, and by the time I finished college I ended up going to the California Institute of Integral Studies — a graduate school that combined the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Eastern philosophy with Western psychology. That was real immersion into a number of spiritual practices and traditions at the same time as I was learning psychology. I probably would have become a spiritual psychologist, but I had this little science bug that woke up almost by the time I was done. I said, wait a minute, how do we know any of this is true? And not only how do we know, but how are we going to generalize it to ease the suffering of thousands or millions of people?

Smoley: You’ve worked at IONS for a number of years. Which of your own personal beliefs have changed as a result of what you’ve done and learned there?

Vieten: When I first came to IONS, I was primarily interested in meditation, mindfulness, spiritual practices, and personal transformation. I also had a fascination with ESP and telepathy. Since I’ve been there I’ve learned more about what we were just talking about — the extreme bias against these topics. I’ve also learned that fighting, or getting sullen, or getting a chip on my shoulder, or complaining actually doesn’t help at all. It doesn’t help the people who are against it, and it doesn’t even really help the people who are supporting you. What’s better is to — like water on a rock — just continuously do great research, do work with integrity that you can stand behind, and continually work toward sparking people’s curiosity and imagination about these topics.

I still have my own internal skepticism sometimes, so I went to talk with Dean Radin, and he was going to do a little remote viewing exercise with the audience. So he said, “I’m about to show a slide from a random selection from 5000 slides, and now move into this remote viewing mode, where you’re open and you’re not going to name anything too quickly,” and he gave some of the training. So I went down on this piece of paper and wrote big, giant swoops, with lines across and little circles. The next slide came up, and it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I was like, “Dean, Dean, Dean, it worked, it worked!” And he was like, “I know. We work here.” So I had that hit. And even though I’m advocating the rigorous investigation of these topics as something potentially real, when it happens at an experiential level I’m still kind of thrilled and excited and surprised.

Smoley: Could you say a little bit about the figures, books, and texts you’ve found most inspiring along the way?

Vieten: I was a drug and alcohol counselor throughout my college years. I found the transformations I witnessed in the Twelve-Step programs — turning your life over to a higher power that comes in and removes something from you —I could see them happening, and I couldn’t tell what the difference was between the people who got it and stayed clean and sober and people who didn’t. But over the years I started to notice that it was kind of a shift in worldview. It was a deep shift in perspective. And I was really interested in knowing what that was.

Again, I was very inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism and Eastern philosophy. Buddhist vipassana seemed to me a common-sense way of approaching self-transcendence and easing suffering. And since then, integral philosophy — at first Aurobindo, and then Ken Wilber, and all kinds of philosophers and scholars that were bringing together the body, the mind, and the spirit as a whole system, instead of separate systems.

Smoley: Science deals with the quantifiable and the measurable. Do you ever think about the levels beyond which not only science is not measuring now, but even theoretically could never measure? The idea that there are things that are simply never going to be sifted through this net of empiricism?

Vieten: When you’re looking at complex phenomena, biologically, chemically, neurologically, or in this domain of the spiritual, this is the metaphor I like to use: it’s almost like you can put a circle of inward-facing mirrors around the phenomenon and you can look in those mirrors. Every one of those might be a study or a personal account, or an anecdote, or it could be all kinds of things. It could even be art or music. But you may not be able to ever get to the actual phenomenon itself.

Let’s say that the phenomenon is love. It doesn’t say we’re ever going to be able to capture love in a bottle. So sometimes I use the metaphor of catching a firefly in a bottle. If you catch the firefly, you’ve got to take a look at it and then you’ve got to let it go, or else it dies. Or it’s like pinning a butterfly to a card. You find a beautiful, rare butterfly in the jungle. You can keep it if you kill it, but then you’ve killed it.

Smoley: When people have paranormal experiences, experiences of God, and so on, a common scientistic response is that this is just the result of some brain state.

Vieten: One of the biggest questions facing us now is, is consciousness produced by the brain and the body, or do the brain and the body reflect consciousness? Or is there some sort of a filter? You know the filter hypothesis — that the brain and our physical being are actually filtering consciousness. I tend to land somewhere in the middle, where it’s probably a two-way street. It’s not just that the brain produces consciousness. Right now, if I asked you to think of an animal or a symbol, you would think of something, and that would make something happen in your brain in response.

Smoley: There’s a lot of fascination these days with the near-death experience. How do you see this phenomenon?

Vieten: What I know most about near-death experiences is their transformative potential, the way they change people’s lives. Many people have them, and they don’t feel a big change. Many people have them, and they feel more scared and insecure and worried. And then there’s a section of people who have near-death experiences, and it changes their lives and profoundly for the positive. It gives them a new perspective on prioritizing their values and their activities. So that much we know, but that doesn’t say whether or not they’re real. You can have that kind of a transformation even through an imaginary experience.

I think the jury is still out on the rigorous, scientific validation of survival of consciousness after bodily death. We have some enticing clues about the potential for measurable, reliable, physical ways of seeing this through mediumship research and through commonalities among people’s experiences. There are also things that people reported anecdotally that they couldn’t have known unless they had consciousness — even though at that point they should not have had any.

There are enough clues, but it’s going to take a lot of effort — on the level of an Apollo space program — to truly investigate this subject. I have a colleague who did an analysis. He said that if you put all of the research on psychic phenomena and clairvoyance and near-death experiences and all of these things together, it still doesn’t add up to the cost of one F-16.

What would be a bigger question for humanity than, does consciousness survive? It’s certainly in the top ten questions that we might like to know about. Why wouldn’t we spend an F-16’s worth of dollars to check it out?

Smoley: Earlier you mentioned Aurobindo and his integral philosophy. One of its main features is the concept of evolution of consciousness. It would seem that both Aurobindo and people who have been influenced by him view this kind of evolution of consciousness as something that we can foster ourselves. That is, you can help yourself evolve. Now the typical Darwinian view is that evolution is a completely blind process, governed completely by natural selection. How do you relate those two things? Do you see a way of integrating them? Do you see them as fundamentally in conflict?

Vieten: It’s possible that they’re both oversimplified, standing alone. So how do we look at the handshake between evolution of consciousness ideas and this random evolution idea?

Recently, you know, when we sequenced the human genome, we thought, OK, we’re going to have all the information we need to make lots of drugs that address specific genetic ailments, because we’re going to be able to see the tens of thousands of alleles that we have in our genetic code. We’re so complex that we must have 80,000–100,000 alleles. It turns out we have about 20,000. In terms of allelic variations, we have less complexity than a grain of rice. So the promise of the human genome project didn’t really pan out.

How do we achieve our level of complexity? It’s because of epigenetics and how we interact with our environment to change how our genes are expressed. Now we know that much of it is highly conditional. So if it is highly conditional, based on our outer environment and our inner environment, our minds, our stress levels, then we can participate in our own evolution. If I know that thinking about fear every single day, or being in pain or a sense of threat every day for a while, changes my gene expression, it stands to reason that being in love or contemplation or meditation or compassion every day would also change my gene expression — imagining that the first would be in a negative way and the second would be in a positive way. How will that affect our intergenerational evolution? That remains to be seen.