13. The danger of excessive denial

Humanity and its vehicle for inquiry, science, have had no choice but to deny the truth of integrative meaning. Science has been reductionist and mechanistic, not holistic. Avoiding the dangerously depressing, whole, integrative meaning-confronting view, science has instead focused on the reduced, reductionist view of finding understanding of the details and mechanisms of our world—mechanisms that might one day, as has now occurred with understanding found of the gene and nerve-based learning systems, make possible clarifying explanation of the human condition, at which point science could then afford to acknowledge integrative meaning and be holistic in its view, as it now can. While science has portrayed itself as being rigorously objective, free of personal bias—the 1993 Hutchinson Dictionary of Science defines ‘scientific method’ as ‘the belief that experimentation and observation, properly understood and applied, can avoid the influence of cultural and social values and so build up a picture of a reality independent of the observer’—the truth is it has been rigorously subjective, deeply influenced by personal evasion and denial; not at all has it built ‘up a picture of a reality independent of the observer’.

Most importantly, while integrative meaning could not be universally acknowledged by science it was vitally important that, as Berdyaev said, a degree of ‘fearlessness’ of the issue of the human condition and of integrative meaning was maintained and tolerated because without it science—which literally means ‘knowledge’—could never hope to fulfil its ultimate role of finding the all-important liberating knowledge of our human condition. To repeat what Berdyaev said: ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror. Fear makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible. Knowledge implies fearlessness…Conquest of fear is a spiritual cognitive act. This does not imply, of Page 48 of
PDF Version course, that the experience of fear is not lived through; on the contrary, it may be deeply felt, as was the case with Kierkegaard, for instance…it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world, and in no way undermines the value of knowledge…it must be said that the very distinction between good and evil is a bitter distinction, the bitterest thing in the world…Moral knowledge is the most bitter and the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us along with the meaning and value of life. There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless. We cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is ultimate. The longing for God in the human heart springs from the fact that we cannot bear to be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil…ethics is bound to contain a prophetic element. It must be a revelation of a clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique of pure conscience.’

As was explained following the inclusion of this quote from Berdyaev in Section 3, in order not to have to ‘be faced for ever with the distinction between good and evil’ humanity had to find understanding of the human condition and as humanity’s vehicle for inquiry into the nature of our world and place in it, this fundamental task to find this all-important knowledge fell to science, and in particular that branch of science that studies behaviour, namely biology—as biologist Edward O. Wilson said, ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’. The immense problem however for scientists was that they, like humanity as a whole, were almost universally having to practice denial of the dangerously depressing issue of the human condition and any truths that brought that issue into focus, in particular the truth of integrative meaning, and this denial made effective inquiry into the human condition virtually impossible. Denial is a form of lying and you can’t build the truth from lies. In fact the dishonesty of denial can only lead to a completely false view of existence and the great danger of the development of such a false view is that if it becomes too developed, pervasive and entrenched then the truth about our human condition might never be able to be reached.

If we look at the effect of humanity’s overall denial of the issue of the human condition upon humans in general we can see very clearly the limiting, atrophying effects of denial. As Plato said, it has caused humans to live in an imprisoned cave-like state of darkness: an alienated, extremely artificial and superficial, ugly, virtually dead state. R.D. Laing offered this candid description of the deadening effect of living in denial of the human condition: ‘[In the world today] there is little conjunction of truth and social “reality”. Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.11 of 156). Humans’ world of denial, of ‘exiled truth’, involved an unreal world of lies and thus of delusions and illusions. In Plato’s cave allegory, the shadows on the back wall of the cave symbolise this world, for his ‘prisoners’ cannot see anything ‘except the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them…And so they would believe that the shadows of the objects…were in all respects real’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.279 of 405). We can include here more of a quote from Laing that was introduced earlier about the extent and effect of human alienation: ‘We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …between us and It [the Godly, ideal state and the issue it raises of our inconsistency with it] there is Page 49 of
PDF Version a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). In another of his books Laing spelt out the consequences of alienation: ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). The term ‘asleep’ was also used by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1791—1822) to describe humans’ current state: ‘Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream / Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream’; and by Wordsworth in his poem, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, where he describes our species’ loss of innocence, ‘of something that is gone…the visionary gleam…the glory and the dream’, he said ‘Our birth is [now] but a sleep and a forgetting’. The Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff described the resigned, alienated state truthfully when he wrote: ‘It happens fairly often that essence dies in a man while his personality and his body are still alive. A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead’ (In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, 1950, ch.8, p.164).

What needs to be recognised is that since science was also practicing this denial it too was stalled, atrophied, virtually dead. Unable to practice truthful and thus effective and penetrating thinking it was incapable of bringing any real insight into the true nature of the workings of our world and our species’ upset condition within it. As has been mentioned, General Omar Bradley highlighted the extreme superficiality and deficiency of mechanistic science when he said, ‘The world has achieved brilliance…without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants’. The woman on talk-back radio echoed the point when she said, ‘we can get a man on the moon but a woman is still not safe walking down the street at night on her own’.

Living in denial of the issue of the human condition and any truths that brought that issue into focus, in particular the truth of integrative meaning, meant that all the thinking of mechanistic scientists was coming off a false base and therefore could only ever present an extremely flawed and limited view of the world. Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott describes how when in denial of a subject that subject ‘cannot be remembered because of its being associated with painful feeling or some other intolerable emotion. Energy has to be all the time employed in maintaining the repression, and…there is relatively little energy left for a direct participation in life’ (Thinking about Children, 1996, p.9 of 343). This inability to properly ‘participate in life’ infers an inability to think freely, openly, honestly and thus effectively about life. Even way back in his time Plato recognised the destructive effect denial of integrative meaning has on our intellect’s capacity to think effectively, when he stated: ‘when the soul [our integratively orientated original instinctual self] uses the instrumentality of the body [uses the body’s intellect with its preoccupation with denial] for any inquiry…it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled…But when it investigates by itself [free of intellectual denial], it passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless, and being of a kindred nature, when it is once independent and free from interference, consorts with it always and strays no longer, but remains, in that realm of the absolute [integrative meaning], constant and invariable’ (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick). Incidentally, and as will be explained in the coming section that presents the explanation for how we acquired our unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic moral sense, the reason our original instinctive self or ‘soul’ is ‘immortal’ is because it is perfectly orientated to the ‘everlasting’ and universal ‘absolute’ truth of integrative meaning.

Page 50 of
PDF Version Mechanistic science has suffered very greatly from an inability to think truthfully and thus effectively. As we will see in the coming ‘History of biological denial’ section, it certainly has ‘los[t] its way and become confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled’. Winnicott articulated the effects of science’s denial of so many critically important truths such as the existence of the human condition and of integrative meaning and, as we will shortly see, of the true, integratively orientated nature of our soul and its resulting moral sense in us, when he asked, ‘Can you see the one essential way in which science and intuition contrast with each other? True intuition can reach to a whole truth in a flash (just as faulty intuition can reach to error), whereas in a [mechanistic] science the whole truth is never reached’ (Thinking about Children, 1996, p.5 of 343). Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860) made the point when he said, ‘the discovery of truth is prevented most effectively…by prejudice, which…stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land’ (Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1970, p.120 of 237).

It is impossible for a system of inquiry to make sense of existence when it is operating from a premise that denies all the important, fundamental truths of our world of the issue of the human condition, of integrative meaning and of the existence and true nature of our soul. As a stark example of science’s denial of the existence of our soul and of integrative meaning, while ‘soul’ is the description we have for the entire instinctive dimension of our human make-up, and selfless ‘love’ is the very theme of the integrative process and thus of existence—and after all ‘soul’ and ‘love’ are two of the most used words in our everyday language—mechanistic science has no definition for or interpretation of them. In the case of our ‘soul’, psychologist Ronald Conway acknowledged how much of an anathema the concept has been for mechanistic science when he said, ‘Soul is customarily suspected in empirical psychology and analytical philosophy as a disreputable entity’ (The Australian, 10 May 2000). In the case of the concept of love, linguist Robin Allott summarised mechanistic science’s attitude to it when he said, ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’ (‘Evolutionary Aspects of Love and Empathy’, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1992, Vol.15, No.4 353-370). Indeed it has been reported that ‘more than 100,000 scientific studies have been published on depression and schizophrenia [the negative aspects of human nature], but no more than a dozen good studies have been published on unselfish love’ (Science & Theology News, Feb. 2004).

The limitations and dangers of mechanistic science’s denial of the issue of the human condition and of so many other important truths has been acknowledged by a number of prominent scientists, including biologist Charles Birch and physicist Paul Davies whose books will be mentioned shortly amongst a collection of integrative-meaning-acknowledging publications. Birch has said that: ‘Reductionism or Mechanism…is the dominant mode of science and is particularly applicable to biology as it is taught today…[it is] A view or model of livingness that leaves out feelings and consciousness…[and] I believe it has grave consequences…In the name of scientific objectivity we have been given an emasculated vision of the world and all that is in it. The wave of anti-science…is an extreme reaction to this malaise…I believe biologists and naturalists have a special responsibility to put another [holistic] image before the world that does justice to the unity of life and all its manifestations of experience—aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational’ (‘Two Ways of Interpreting Nature’, Australian Natural History, Vol.21 No.2, 1983). Paul Davies similarly said: ‘But there is a deeper reason for the wide-spread antipathy. It is connected with the underlying philosophy of science itself. For 300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this view of the world all physical systems are regarded as basically machines…I have little doubt that much of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought…Mechanistic thought has undoubtedly had a stifling effect on the human spirit. Liberation from this centuries-old straight jacket [i.e. the adoption of a holistic approach] will enable human beings to re-Page 51 of
PDF Version integrate themselves and the physical world of which they are a part’ (‘Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness’, The Australian, 9 Oct. 1991).

It is true, to end the ‘stifling effect on the human spirit’ ‘from this centuries-old straight jacket’ of ‘mechanistic thinking’ ‘biologists and naturalists have a special responsibility to put another [non-mechanistic] image before the world’; however for science to adopt such a non-mechanistic, holistic view required understanding of the human condition to be found, and to find that required two things—it needed denial in science to not become too developed and entrenched and thus oppressive of any truth, and it needed at least some scientists to defy the prevailing attitude of denial. As Berdyaev emphasised, ‘victory over [the] ancient, primeval terror’ of our condition depended on maintaining a degree of ‘daring’ ‘fearlessness’. Berdyaev also explained that such a ‘fearless’ approach could only come from individuals with a relatively ‘clear conscience, unclouded by social conventions; it must be a critique of pure conscience’, truthfully describing such ‘a critique of pure conscience’, which is a relatively alienation and thus denial-free capacity, as a ‘prophetic element’. The common dictionary definition of a ‘prophet’ is ‘someone who speaks for God’ and, since God is integrative meaning, someone who speaks for God is someone who doesn’t conform to the prevailing practice of denying integrative meaning. Obviously there was always a great range or spectrum of upset in the human population, with some people having been more exposed to the upsetting battle that humanity has been waging against the ignorant instinctive state than others. Prophets were simply those individuals at the innocent end of the spectrum, individuals who had relatively little exposure to upset and who were thus relatively sound in self, relatively free of the alienating psychological block-out or denial that upset humans historically had to employ to protect themselves from the condemning criticism of their corrupted condition. Of course with understanding of the human condition found upset will subside and eventually end and all humans will then be denial-free, truthful-thinking prophets—as R.D. Laing once said, ‘Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.26 of 156). (For a more detailed analysis of the spectrum of alienation in society and the different varieties of denial-free thinking prophets, see the ‘Resignation’ chapter in A Species In Denial.)

Plato was clearly a prophet. The extraordinarily penetrating quotes of his that have been included already reveal how sound he must have been to be able to confront integrative meaning or God to the extent he was clearly able to. For most people what Plato was able to engage were truths that were unbearable, as this quote acknowledges: ‘Plato was ever aspiring to intuitions of a truth which in this world [that most people are living in] could never be wholly revealed,—a truth of which glimpses only could be obtained, partly by the most abstract powers of thought, partly by the imagination…Plato…was an artist, and clothed all his thoughts in beauty; and if there be (as there surely is) a truth which is above the truth of [mechanistic] scientific knowledge, that was the truth after which Plato aspired. Aristotle’s aspirations were for methodised experience and the definite’ (Aristotle, Sir Alexander Grant, 1877, p.6 of 196, from a series titled Ancient Classics). The truth is Plato was just as scientifically rigorous—as ‘methodised’ and interested in the ‘definite’—as Aristotle, it’s just that Aristotle wasn’t sound enough to confront ‘a truth’ ‘as there surely is’ of integrative meaning and as a result he founded the evasive, denial-complying mechanistic approach to inquiry. (Note, there is a whole chapter in A Species In Denial, titled ‘Deciphering Plato’s Cave Allegory’, that is dedicated to presenting a detailed analysis of the allegory.)

Later we will see how some exceptional denial-free thinking and thus sound and thus effective thinking prophets became the focal points for religions, however the relevance or significance of prophets in contemporary times has of course nothing to do with forming a Page 52 of
PDF Version religion. The concern now is simply to, as Berdyaev said, find ‘knowledge of good and evil’, and the truth is for that to be possible a ‘prophetic element’ is required. As will be explained later, faith was a way of coping when we couldn’t understand our corrupted condition, so the bringing of understanding to the human condition actually ends the need for faith. Religion is being obsoleted, not created. When van der Post truthfully said that ‘we need a new kind of explorer, a new kind of pathfinder, human beings who, now that the physical world is spread out before us like an open book…are ready to turn and explore in a new dimension’, he was necessarily referring to people who were capable of looking inwards at the issue of the human condition. Plato was also referring to this ‘fearless’ ability ‘to look straight at reality’ when he said ‘this capacity [of a mind…to see clearly] is innate in each man’s mind [we are born with an instinctive orientation to integrative meaning], and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness [the upset state of living in denial] to light [the truth] unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the Good [integrative meaning or God]’ (The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.283 of 405).

As the world has approached total exhaustion from the ever-increasing horror of the upset state of the human condition, so the need for such an honest approach in science has become a matter of urgency and, most importantly and most fortunately, some scientists and science commentators have been able to follow the ‘fearless’ examples of Smuts, Schrödinger and Koestler and acknowledge the truth of integrative meaning. Titles written by these scientists and commentators offer evidence (particularly the words underlined) of this precious acknowledgment: Professor John Morton wrote Man, Science and God in 1971 and Redeeming Creation in 1984; Professor David Bohm wrote Wholeness and The Implicate Order in 1980; Professors Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers wrote Order Out of Chaos in 1984; Professor Paul Davies wrote God and the New Physics in 1983, The Cosmic Blueprint in 1987 and The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning in 1992; Professor Charles Birch wrote Nature and God in 1965, On Purpose in 1990 and Biology and The Riddle of Life in 1999; Dr M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos in 1992; Roger Lewin wrote Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, the major new theory that unifies all sciences in 1993; Professor Stuart Kauffman wrote The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution in 1993, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity in 1995 and Anti-chaos in 1996; and Dr Richard J. Bird wrote Chaos and Life: Complexity and Order in Evolution and Thought in 2003. As has been explained, the terms ‘wholeness’, ‘order’, ‘self-organisation’ and ‘complexity’ used in these titles are all aspects of the purposeful, meaningful, goal-directed, holistic, teleological, Godly, integrative theme of existence.

Another expression of this ‘fearless’ effort by some scientists to acknowledge integrative meaning was the establishment in the United States in 1984 of the independent Santa Fe Institute ‘for the Study of Complexity’. Stuart Kauffman, whose books about integrative meaning feature in the list above, was one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute.

As prize-winning British science writer Roger Lewin acknowledged in his above-mentioned book, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, ‘the study of complexity represents nothing less than a major revolution in science’ (p.10 of 208). Being so heretical, this honest, holistic ‘revolution’ was bound to meet resistance, as was described in a newspaper article titled Science Friction, written by journalist Deidre Macken and published in Australia in 1991. Referring to a ‘scientific revolution’ and a coming ‘monumental paradigm shift’, Macken wrote that the few scientists who have ‘dared to take a holistic approach’ are seen Page 53 of
PDF Version by the scientific orthodoxy as committing ‘scientific heresy’. Macken said scientists taking the ‘holistic approach’, such as ‘physicist Paul Davies and biologist Charles Birch’ (Australian scientists whose works are mentioned above and who have both appropriately enough been awarded the Templeton Prize for ‘increasing man’s understanding of God’) are trying ‘to cross the great divide between science and religion’, and are ‘not afraid of terms such as “purpose” and “meaning”’. She added: ‘Quite a number of biologists got upset [about this new development] because they don’t want to open the gates to teleology—the idea that there is goal-directed change is an anathema to biologists who believe [evade the condemning truth of integrative meaning by saying] that change is random…The emerging clash of scientific thought has forced many of the new scientists on to the fringe. Some of the pioneers no longer have university positions, many publish their theories in popular books rather than journals, others have their work sponsored by independent organisations…Universities are not catering for the new paradigm’ (Good Weekend mag., Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Nov. 1991).

Consistent with what Berdyaev said, all these scientists and science commentators who have been ‘fearless’ in their recognition of integrative meaning were being ‘prophetic’. In fact almost all the quotes used in this book are ‘prophetic’ in their exceptional honesty—this book is essentially an assemblage of all the exceptional modern day, contemporary, knowledge-seeking (as opposed to the ancient religion-forming) prophets for one great vanquishing assault on the world of denial. Indeed most of the authors of the books mentioned above and the quotes mentioned throughout have been explicitly described as prophets at some time or other. For example, Paul Davies has been called a ‘latter day prophet’ (‘God Only Knows’, Compass, ABC-TV, 23 Mar. 1997), and Charles Birch as a ‘scientist-prophet’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 2000). Some who have been exceptionally unevasive have even been described as ‘messianic’. For instance, in his 20 December 1996 London Times obituary, Laurens van der Post was described as a ‘prophet’ and his work as ‘messianic’. Arthur Koestler, who has understandably frequently been described as a ‘prophet’, was noted as having a ‘messiah complex’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Dec. 1986), while R.D. Laing, who was also understandably frequently described as a ‘prophet’, was also labelled a ‘messiah’ (R.D. Laing A Biography, Adrian Laing, 1994, p.161 of 248). ‘Messiah’ in dictionaries means ‘liberator’, and since what is required to liberate humanity from the human condition is the ‘fearless’ preparedness to confront the issue of the human condition, van der Post, Koestler and Laing were being messianic. The greater truth of course is that while there have always been a few ‘fearless’ prophets in the spectrum of alienation in society, they were never going to be in a position to assemble the liberating explanation of the human condition until science found sufficient details about the mechanisms of the workings of our world—in particular understanding of the different ways genes and nerves process information—to make that clarifying explanation possible; all of which means the real liberator of humanity from the human condition is science. Prophets have a relatively easy job—the really difficult task was to painstakingly accumulate first-principle understanding of the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world. Exceptional innocence played an important but minuscule concluding role in our search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge. To use an analogy, in gridiron football the team as a whole (with one exception) does all the hard work gaining yardage down the field. Finally when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts, a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he (actually not ‘he’ but ‘they’ because prophets do need the support of each other to be able to defy denial)—in his unsoiled attire—kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the exhausted players who did all the hard work. As it turns out, science had found all the necessary clues that make explanation of the human condition possible—in particular the laws of physics, the principle of natural Page 54 of
PDF Version selection, the DNA mechanism that makes natural selection possible, the fossil record of our ancestors and all the studies of primate behaviour, especially those of bonobos. The problem has been that all these clues have been presented in such an evasive, dishonest way that extracting and assembling the explanation of the human condition from them, and beyond that having denial-habituated science accept the denial-free account, is not a project that is at all guaranteed of success. Everywhere in science dishonesty has become dangerously excessive. For example, there are now said to be genes for every kind of ailment—such as depression, drug addiction, violence, obesity, delinquency, suicide, sex addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia—when the truth is human sickness is, in the main, psychologically derived. It’s our extremely upset condition that is the problem on Earth but only the very few will recognise and talk about that.

As we will see in the latter half of this book, the practice of denial was rapidly cloaking the world so that not even a tiny ray of light/ truth was able to get through. We will see that the state of eternal darkness was almost upon us—the alienation death of humanity was only a step away. In the case of science, Deidre Macken’s talk of a coming ‘monumental paradigm shift’ and a ‘scientific revolution’ suggested that acknowledgment of holism or integrative meaning was becoming a trend, but this wasn’t true. The reality is that despite the brave efforts of a few, denial in science was becoming more and more self-assured and sophisticated and as a result more and more dangerously oppressive of truth. For instance, wherever integrative meaning was being acknowledged it was invariably being met with stiffer and stiffer resistance. The Santa Fe Institute for example, while still operating in 2006, has degenerated into an organisation beset with internal dissent, deflected from its original manifesto of ‘studying complexity’ to now ‘fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science’. Even the Templeton Prize, which was originally awarded for ‘increasing man’s understanding of God’, is now, in 2006, awarded ‘for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’.

What this section has sought to make clear is that trying to investigate reality from a position of denial was only ever going to mean that biology would, as Plato predicted, ‘lose its way and become confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled’ in terms of its ability to make any progress on the all-important task of finding understanding of the true nature of our world and our human-condition-afflicted place in it. The picture that has been put forward is of science becoming increasingly committed to denial with only a precious few trying desperately to defy the trend. The question has been: would the ever-increasing levels of upset in humans and thus alienation mean that denial would become so pervasive that it would succeed in blocking any chance of insight into the human condition being found, or would the few ‘fearlessly’ resisting the trend prevail?

As will be documented in the coming Section 16, ‘The history of biological denial’, what happened is that while mechanistic science did find a great deal of valuable knowledge about the mechanisms of the workings of our world, its practice of denial, especially in the all-important field of biology, became so over-developed it almost did stop any possibility of this knowledge being effectively used to make any real sense of how the natural world works and of our extraordinary conscious place and troubled condition within it. Charles Birch, who incidentally I was clearly extremely fortunate to have as my biology professor when I studied biology at Sydney University, summarised just how stalled this discipline had become when he said, ‘Biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’ (in conversation with the author, 20 Mar. 1987).

Deidre Macken mentioned that ‘the emerging clash of scientific thought has forced many of the new scientists on to the fringe. Some of the pioneers no longer have university positions, many publish their theories in popular books rather than journals, others have their work sponsored Page 55 of
PDF Version by independent organisations…Universities are not catering for the new paradigm’. The truth is lying in science had become all-dominant and all-confident, to the extent that it was virtually impossible for any profound insights to emerge from within its structure. This comment from Charles Birch provides a worthy summation of the atrophied state that is academia: ‘There is a problem about mechanistic science, it can’t deal with certain questions…every individual entity, be it cell or an atom, and certainly human beings…is different by virtue of the relationships that they have with the whole that they belong to. Now that is the most important thing I think that one can begin to think about, the [integrative, holistic] nature of the world, the universe…and I think this is the sort of exploratory area which could transform a lot of thinking. In other words, science can’t deal with subjectivity…This [subjective, human-condition-confronting truthful world view] is something that is very difficult to get your teeth into [confront] and yet it is the most important thing in the world…what we were all taught in universities for decades is really recognised now as pretty much a dead end’ (World Transformation Movement Open Day address in Sydney, 4 Dec. 1993). Biologist Mary E. Clark came to a similar conclusion when she said, ‘Formal learning has become a meaningless vaccination process, and the information transmitted is next to useless for properly understanding the world’ (Ariadne’s Thread: The Search for New Modes of Thinking, 1989). And, as will be described in the next section, Arthur Koestler could see that ‘the citadel they [mechanistic scientists] are defending lies in ruins’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, p.192 of 354). Only a holistic approach, one that acknowledged integrative meaning, could hope to make any real progress in understanding the real nature of our world and our place in it.