Foreword to
The New Paradigm
by John O'M. Bockris

Larry Dossey, MD
2004

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way a distinguished professor at the top of his field censored by his colleagues for exploring a new idea in the physical sciences. But as Professor John O'M. Bockris discovered, there is a shadow side of science that often lies in wait for those who stray too far from its accepted canons.

This may sound shocking to laypersons who regard science as an exercise in unfettered thinking. Yet in all areas of cultural endeavor, including science, there is a conservative vector that can erupt unpredictably into a pernicious, inquisitorial exercise as it did toward Professor Bockris when he and his colleagues began experimenting with a novel source of energy, as he explains in the pages that follow.

Conservatism in science is a valuable, self-correcting influence that helps researchers stay on track by adhering to time-honored methodologies and codes of conduct. Yet there is a point beyond which conservatism inhibits creativity and is actually traitorous to the lofty ideals of science. Alfred North Whitehead, the great mathematician-philosopher, lamented this situation. In 1948, in words that still apply, he observed, "The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophical adventure. The Universe is vast. ¹

I have often wondered why some scientists appear so fearful of new ideas, and why they expend huge amounts of energy attacking those who represent them. Clues may lie in the distant past.

Philosopher Karen Armstrong describes, in her landmark book The Battle for God, how human beings have ² evolved two main ways of knowing, which scholars call mythos and logos. Both methods were essential, and neither was complete without the other. Mythos was considered timeless and unchanging, and was the foundation for religion and spirituality. Its special area of competence was not practicality but meaning. It shed light on human origins, the purpose of life, the origins of culture, and human destiny following death. Its contribution to human welfare was absolutely essential. Modern research confirms that without an adequate source of meaning, humans fall into despair and often sicken and die. Mythos was a sustaining corrective to this tendency; it lent a depth and richness to life by directing ones inner gaze to the eternal and the universal.

In contrast, logos was concerned not with meaning but with practicality. It prized reason, intellectuality, analysis, and the human talent for problem solving. It converted the literal lessons of mythos into metaphor, and sought to understand the workings of the world outside of a religious context. Beginning in the 1600s, logos evolved into what we now call science, while mythos continued to be anchored as always in religion, revelation, and mystical experience. Following the European Enlightenment, logos became the dominant way of knowing for millions of Westerners, who were convinced that mythos had served its purpose and could be safely retired.

But although the ancient myths were dismissed, the human need for meaning did not disappear. Hungering for a new source of meaning, modern humans invented new myths to sustain them, as humans have always done. One of these is the belief that science is a sufficient explanation for all there is. This often involves scientism, which is the cloaking of ones personal views in the robes of science in an attempt to justify ones personal convictions about how the world ought to work. Those who adhere to scientism know in advance how the universe should behave, and they are impatient with any scientist who produces evidence that says otherwise. This gambit, of course, is not science, which is value-neutral and was never intended to answer questions of meaning and purpose. But the dogmas of scientism have become all too common in many areas of science, as Professor Bockris explains.

A major sticking point in modern science concerns the evidence that consciousness may act remotely beyond the confines of the brain and body, and possibly outside the present. This possibility has been raised by several studies in remote healing and intercessory prayer. Many other studies suggest that humans may acquire health-relevant ³ information in dreams and visions, in ways that transcend our current understanding of the brain. To those who adhere ³ to a purely brain-based definition of consciousness, these findings reek of mythos, not logos, and are anathema. Some think they should be dismissed without a hearing. As one scientist said of this general area of investigation, "This is the sort of thing I would not believe, even if it were true." But as Professor Bockris describes in the pages that follow, ⁴ many controversial ideas such as these are buttressed by impressive scientific evidence.

Can the ancient complementarity between logos and mythos be recovered? If so, this would go far in resolving the intellectual indigestion many scientists experience when cutting-edge ideas that seem mythos-linked surface in science, such as the nonlocal operations of consciousness seen in remote healing experiments. The plain fact is that science has never been able to sanitize itself of mythos although it has tried heroically to do so. As many scholars have noted, scientific breakthroughs have often taken place during mythos-like states of dreaming and reverie when the muscular efforts of logos are temporarily set aside. , Maybe we have had it wrong; perhaps mythos and logos were not ^{5 6} fundamentally opposed to begin with. It is important to examine this possibility, because the assumption that logos and mythos are incompatible fuels the militant opposition toward certain lines of evidence discussed in this book.

Philosopher Jacob Needleman in his book A Sense of the Cosmos describes the earliest days of science, when ⁷ this fledgling way of knowing was just forming, before it was even called "science." The first generation of scientists, Needleman states, wanted a first-hand, personal confrontation with reality that was unmediated by anyone else. At that time in history the Church was the middle man who interpreted the world for everyone. The earliest scientists, however, wishing to by-pass all intermediaries, went to "the wall of truth," in Needlemans graphic words, through their new empirical approaches. Here lies a profound connection between logos-based science and mythos-based religion and spirituality. In the esoteric side of all religions there exists a thread called mysticism, whose practitioners, the mystics, also seek an unmediated confrontation with truth. Seen from this perspective, authentic science and genuine mysticism share an identical passion: a vivid, personal knowledge of the Real. This is not to say that the methods of mystics and scientists are the same, only that the thirst for knowledge seems to flow from a common urge.

This linkage between mysticism and science, between mythos and logos, was not to last, however. Needleman describes how succeeding generations of scientists quickly lost their awareness of this golden connection and began to reify the formalisms of scientific method over the pursuit of unmediated truth. The result was that science quickly became the only legitimate way of acquiring knowledge. As the old link was forgotten, logos was elevated to the position once occupied by mythos the source of meaning and the answers to all of the Great Questions: the origin of the universe and of life, and the nature of mind, thought, and behavior.

Perhaps the ascent of science was inevitable. Having dethroned mythos and consigned it to the dustbin of history, a new source of meaning had to be found we cannot live without it and the next-best candidate was science.

Science is a hard path. It requires that those who follow it set aside their egos and biases and let nature speak for itself. This is exceedingly difficult to do, because everyone, including scientists, harbors personal views about how nature should behave, even when put to the test in empirical experiments. The New Paradigm challenges scientists to do exactly that, however to set all prejudices aside and resist the temptation to censor science and scientists when nature does not conform to their expectations.

How did science become so polarized against the phenomena discussed in this book? How, for instance, can scientists in the field of parapsychology believe that consciousness manifests remotely in space and time, while scientists in areas such as chemistry and physics deny that such things are possible? One reason is that scientists do science differently. As a result, they often come to different conclusions, especially where the operations of consciousness are concerned.

One major area of difference is the reliance on "blind" or "double-blind" ways of doing experiments. In a typical double-blind, controlled medical experiment, for example, two groups of subjects are involved. One is given the treatment that is being evaluated a new drug, say while the other group, the "controls," are not. In a blind study, the subjects are not aware of which group they are in; and in a double-blind experiment, neither the experimenter nor the subjects knows this information. The double-blind design prevents the researcher from inserting his or her bias into the experiment and seeing what s/he wants to see.

Medical researchers have painfully learned that even the most diligent experimenter is capable of grossly misinterpreting an experiment. That is why controlled studies have become the gold standard in clinical research. However, this is not the case in most areas of science, an this has contributed to major discrepancies in the world views of scientists working in different areas.

In a review of 1,548 papers submitted to high-status science journals, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake found that zero percent of papers in the physical sciences of physics and chemistry used blinded or double-blind research methods; in the biological sciences only 0.8 percent used such; in psychology and animal behavior, 4.9 percent did so; in the medical sciences, 24.2 percent used them; and in parapsychology, 85.2 percent employed such. This is a telling rebuttal to the critics of parapsychology, which is one of the areas discussed by Professor Bockris. Far from being a mythos-dominated field, its research standards are some of the most precise within all of science.

The need to guard against self-deception is poorly understood within many areas of science. In his study, Sheldrake states, "When academic scientists were interviewed for this survey, some did not know what was meant by the term 'blind methodology.' Most were aware of blind techniques, but thought that they were necessary only in clinical research or psychology. They believed that the principle purpose of these methods was to avoid biases introduced by human subjects, rather than by experimenters. The most common view expressed by physical and biological scientists was that blind methodologies are unnecessary outside psychology and medicine because 'nature itself is blind,' as one professor put it. Some admitted the theoretical possibility of bias by experimenters, but thought it of little importance in practice. One chemist added, '[s]cience is difficult enough as it is without making it even harder by not knowing what you are working on.' " ⁸

According to the scientific ideal, all scientists should arrive at a uniform picture of the world by using similar methodologies. Yet, as Sheldrake showed, they do not use similar methods. The result is a confused picture of the world reminiscent of the parable of the blind men feeling the elephant a mixture of opinions of what an elephant actually is, and the temptation to substitute personal half-truths for objective whole ones.

Scientists need elbow room to explore, because it is on the fringes of science that the most exciting breakthroughs often happen. This means that scientists need the freedom to be wrong. But isnt "being wrong" a vanishing species in science? The heady messages from science these days suggest that we are closing in on a TOE, a Theory of Everything, that will condense all scientific knowing into a concise theory or formula. This fantastic increase in knowledge should constrain scientists and help them focus on what really matters, preventing wild flights of fancy and being wrong.

Another view, however, suggests that the situation is not so sunny. As cosmologist Stephen Hawking concedes, "We have no idea how the world really is. All we do is build up models which seem to prove our theories." And as ⁹ legendary physician Lewis Thomas, former director of research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said, "The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect." ¹⁰

Tolerance for new ideas, even for those that dont fit in, is desperately required if science is to retain its claim as a valid way of knowing. Although he was not a friend of many of the areas discussed in this book, astronomer Carl Sagan hit the right note in his 1991 UCLA commencement address. "It is the responsibility of scientists," he said, "never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not." ¹¹

This book is important for everyone. The decisions scientists make about what is acceptable to investigate and what is not will shape our destiny for centuries, and may even determine the fate of humankind and our planet.

To Professor John O'M. Bockris and his courageous defense of the free pursuit of knowledge, I bow deeply.

Larry Dossey, MD Author: Healing Beyond the Body, Reinventing Medicine, and Healing Words