Alan Wallace: "The Retinal Blindspot in the Vision of Our Origins," Part 2

Among scientists, as polymath lecturer, Alan Wallace points out, it is still generally considered "impolite" to bring up the question of what 'consciousness' is. Consciousness, it seems, is still very much the 800-pound gorilla in the science lab or classroom.

Yet, as Wallace observes, William James (one of the fathers of modern psychology), in speaking on the subject of consciousness more than a century ago, remarked: "That which we ignore recedes from our experienced sense of reality." This is, of course, a danger that Wallace made clear in the first half of his extensive lecture (embedded below) highlighting the problem that consciousness still presents for the mainstream of Western science.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Wallace observes, we have more information about the 'Big Bang' and the nano-seconds thereafter than we do of the origins of human consciousness. "There are no scientific means," Wallace notes, "of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in anything, including you or me right now."

It is odd, Wallace points out, that we have virtually no knowledge of something which is so intimate to each of us. "Right now," he observes, "if one were were to ask cutting-edge people, that is people working in the cognitive neurosciences . . . what are the necessary and sufficient causes for the origination of consciousness in a human being . . . the answer would be: 'We don't know.'"

Further, Wallace asks, what is the nature of matter? This, of course, is perhaps the great question - with 'some' solutions (matter is essentially the same as energy, Einstein demonstrated) - of the new physics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century with the framing of both relativity and quantum theory. "There was something called twentieth-century physics," Wallace notes, "that makes the chunks of 'stuff' get very, very ethereal."

Wallace points out that "by the time you have the 'measurement problem' in quantum mechanics that makes at least suspect the very existence of quantum phenomenon before they are measured - in which the role of measurement remains a mystery in understanding the significance (and) the nature of the quantum realm - by the time you are speaking about probability waves that are being measured and that somehow collapse into actual particles . . . then matter has somehow become more ethereal than was assumed in the nineteenth century."

"You can," he notes, "(even) raise the question: 'Is there any energy in the nature of empty space itself?'" And the answer is, he points out, likely 'yes.' There is, he points out, a growing scientific consensus that the universe emerged from a quantum fluctuation and is imbued with 'dark energy'  and 'information' about the original fluctuation that we cannot even directly observe, although the mathematics indicates that it is there.

"As soon of you speak of the universe of space, time, mass, (and) energy as an emergent property arising out of a hidden (and) underlying dimension of information, the question of consciousness at least can be raised," Wallace observes. Information being, at least on its surface, a matter of the mind, the whole question of consciousness should therefore, according to Wallace, be once again kicked back into the scientific debate of just what the universe is. And yet, as he points out again, any scientific agreement that consciousness itself is a valid subject for scientific inquiry is still somehow lacking.

"Instead of simply assuming that the mind emerges from matter, Wallace concludes, it is possible now . . . and scientifically credible to consider the possibility that space-time and mass-energy all emerge from an underlying dimension of reality that may transcend the very duality of mind and matter."

And, it goes without saying, of course, that this very notion of a non-dual implicate order Wallace speaks of is the essential teaching of all the great Eastern (as well as some Western) wisdom traditions, a point that has not been lost on some of the leading-edge voices - scientific as well as spiritual - who, like Wallace, have probed the rarified and ethereal area where science and Eastern wisdom traditions seem to converge.

Pre-rational, Rational and Trans-rational Religion

In an extremely insightful preliminary to his video discussion with Father Thomas Keating, integral theorist and philosopher Ken Wilber looks at the differing perspectives humankind has on spirituality and religion, distinguishing the esoteric from the exoteric, and (broadly outlining his theory of “integral dynamics”) the pre-rational, rational and trans-rational religious worldviews.

“Part of what religion in its highest effort can do is help men and women move from the pre-rational forms of religion, to the rational forms, to the trans-rational,” he observes, noting that  “(t)here is an enormous amount of evidence that it can do that.”

Nevertheless, Wilber notes that all of these forms of religion are equally valid for those holding such religious views. The difficulty, he points out, is convincing each group that they are not exclusively right, thereby creating a conversation that can integrate all three viewpoints, and allowing all three viewpoints to evolve.

“Those who look into spirituality or religion for more than an hour realize that there are at least two very different types of spirituality and religion," Wilber observes, "and there are many different ways to categorize them. Traditionally, they are referred to as esoteric and exoteric, the inner and outer forms. Another way of looking at it is that some of the forms of religion are clearly ‘pre-rational,’ ‘magic’ and ‘mythic.’ And, yet other forms are ‘trans-rational.’ They are deeply, deeply contemplative, and move beyond any ordinary categories of reason and logic, but not beneath it. They transcend and include reason. They are not anti-rational."


Wilber continues:

“So how, indeed, to get this kind of conversation going in the modern world is very difficult. Because if you look at some of the more dogmatic forms of religion . . . not that dogma is bad, it has it’s place . . . but if you look at these types that we are calling exoteric, or religion of myth and dogma, its arguably the cause of more human suffering and death than any other man-mad cause on the face of the planet.”

“And yet if you look at the great paths of liberation, those (are) contemplative paths that have claimed to show men and women a doorway in the deepest part of their own consciousness to that realm which is timeless and spaceless, and beyond death and pain and mortality.”

“So on the one hand we have religion causing the most human suffering imaginable, and on the other hand the only path out of human suffering that we know of. How to get that conversation going is extraordinarily difficult and yet there arguably is no more important conversation we can have.”