During the last three centuries, Western science has been dominated by the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, a system of thought based on the work of the British scientist Isaac Newton and the French philosopher René Descartes.4 Using this model, physics has made astonishing progress, gaining great reputation among all the other disciplines. Its consistent use of mathematics, efficacy in problem solving, and successful application in various areas of everyday life have set standards for all of science. The ability to relate basic concepts and findings to the mechanistic model of the universe developed by Newtonian physics became an important criterion of scientific legitimacy in more complex and less developed fields, such as biology, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology. Initially, this firm adherence to the mechanistic world view had a very positive impact on scientific progress in these disciplines. However, in the course of later development, the conceptual frameworks derived from the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm lost their revolutionary power and became serious obstacles for scientific research and progress.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, physics has undergone profound and radical changes, transcending the mechanistic world view and all the basic assumptions of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. In the course of this extraordinary transformation, it has become quite complex, esoteric, and incomprehensible for most scientists outside the realm of physics. As a result, disciplines like medicine, psychology, and psychiatry have failed to adjust to these rapid changes and to assimilate them into their way of thinking. The world view long outdated in modern physics continues to be considered scientific in many other fields, to the detriment of future progress. Observations and data that are in conflict with the mechanistic model of the universe tend to be discarded or suppressed, and research projects that have no relevance for the dominant paradigm have no chance for funding. Parapsychology, alternative approaches to healing, psychedelic research, thanatology, and certain areas of anthropological fieldwork are salient examples.
During the last two decades, the antievolutionary and counterproductive nature of the old paradigm has become increasingly obvious, particularly in those scientific disciplines that study human beings. In psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, the conceptual schisms have reached such a degree that these disciplines seem to be facing a deep crisis, comparable in scope to the crisis physics was facing at the time of the Michelson-Morley experiment. There is an urgent need for a fundamental paradigm shift that would make it possible to accommodate an ever-increasing influx of revolutionary data from various areas that are in irreconcilable conflict with the old models. Many researchers feel that the new paradigm should also make it possible to bridge the gap separating our traditional psychology and psychiatry from the profound wisdom of the ancient and Oriental systems of thought. Before discussing in detail the reasons for the forthcoming scientific revolution and the possible directions it may take, it is appropriate to describe the characteristic features of the old paradigm the adequacy of which is now being seriously questioned.
Newton’s mechanistic universe is a universe of solid matter, made of atoms,5 small and indestructible particles that constitute its fundamental building blocks. They are essentially passive and unchangeable; their mass and form always remain constant. Newton’s most important contribution to the otherwise comparable model of the Greek atomists was a precise definition of the force acting between the particles. He referred to it as the force of gravity and established that it was directly proportionate to the masses involved and indirectly proportionate to the square of their distance. In Newton’s system, gravity is a rather mysterious entity. It is seen as an intrinsic attribute of the bodies it acts upon; this action is exerted instantaneously over distance.
Another essential characteristic of the Newtonian universe is the three-dimensional space of classic Euclidean geometry, which is absolute, constant, and always at rest. The distinction between matter and empty space is clear and unambiguous. Similarly, time is absolute, autonomous, and independent of the material world; it shows a uniform and unchangeable flow from the past through the present to the future. According to Newton, all physical processes can be reduced to movements of material points that result from the force of gravity acting among them and causing their mutual attraction. Newton was able to describe the dynamics of these forces by means of the new mathematical approach of differential calculus that he had invented for the purpose.
The resulting image of the universe is of a gigantic and entirely deterministic clockwork. The particles move according to eternal and unchangeable laws, and the events and processes in the material world consist of chains of interdependent causes and effects. As a consequence, it should be possible—at least in principle—to reconstruct accurately any past situation in the universe or predict everything in its future with absolute certainty. Practically, this is never actually possible; however, this circumstance is explained by our inability to obtain detailed information about all the intricate variables involved in any particular situation. The theoretical feasibility of such an undertaking is never seriously questioned. As a basic metaphysical assumption, this represents an essential element of the mechanistic world view. Ilya Prigogine (1980) called this belief in unlimited predictability “the founding myth of classical science.”
Another important influence in the philosophy and history of science during the last two centuries has been René Descartes, one of the greatest French philosophers. His most significant contribution to the leading paradigm was an extreme formulation of the absolute dualism between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), resulting in a belief that the material world can be described objectively, without reference to the human observer. This concept was instrumental in the rapid development of the natural sciences and technology, but one of its ultimate consequences has been a serious neglect of a holistic approach to human beings, society, and life on this planet. In a sense, the Cartesian legacy proved to be a more recalcitrant element in Western science than the Newtonian mechanistic world view. Even Albert Einstein—a genius who undermined the foundations of Newtonian physics, formulated single-handedly the theories of relativity, and initiated quantum theory— was incapable of freeing himself from the spell of Cartesian dualism (Capra 1982).
Whenever we use the term “Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm,” we should be aware that Western mechanistic science has skewed and distorted the legacy of these two great thinkers. For both Newton and Descartes, the concept of God was an essential element in their philosophies and world views. Newton was a deeply spiritual person who had great interest in astrology, occultism, and alchemy. In the words of his biographer, John Maynard Keynes (1951), he was the last of the great magicians, rather than the first great scientist. Newton believed that the universe was material in its nature, but he did not think its origin could be explained from material causes. According to him, it was God who had initially created the material particles, the forces between them, and the laws that govern their motions. The universe, having once been created, would continue to function as a machine and could be described and understood in those terms. Descartes also believed that the world existed objectively and independently of the human observer. For him, however, its objectivity was based on its constantly being perceived by God.
Western science subjected Newton and Descartes to the same treatment that Marx and Engels gave Hegel. While formulating the principles of dialectic and historical materialism, they dissected Hegel’s phenomenology of the world spirit, keeping his dialectics but replacing spirit with matter. Similarly, conceptual thinking in many disciplines represents a direct logical extension of the Newtonian-Cartesian model, but the image of divine intelligence that was at the core of the speculations of these two great men disappeared from the picture. The consequential systematic and radical philosophical materialism became the new ideological foundation of the modern scientific world view.
In all its numerous ramifications and applications, the Newtonian-Cartesian model has proved extremely successful in a variety of areas. It provided a comprehensive explanation of the basic mechanics of the solar system and was effectively applied to the understanding of the continuous motion of fluids, the vibration of elastic bodies, and thermodynamics. It became the basis of, and the moving force behind, the remarkable progress of the natural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The disciplines that modeled themselves after Newton and Descartes have elaborated in detail an image of the universe as an immensely complex mechanical system, an assembly of passive and inert matter, developing with no participation of consciousness or creative intelligence. From the Big Bang through the initial expansion of the galaxies to the creation of the solar system and the early geophysical processes that created this planet, the cosmic evolution was allegedly governed solely by blind mechanical forces. According to this model, life originated in the primeval ocean, accidentally, as a result of random chemical reactions. Similarly, the cellular organization of organic matter and the evolution to higher life forms occurred quite mechanically, without participation of an intelligent principle, through random genetic mutations and a natural selection guaranteeing the survival of the fittest. This eventually resulted in a ramified phylogenetic system of hierarchically arranged species with increasing levels of complexity.
Then, somewhere very high in the Darwinian pedigree, a spectacular—and so far unexplainable—event occurred: the unconscious and inert matter became aware of itself and of the surrounding world. Although the mechanism involved in this miraculous event entirely escapes even the crudest attempts at scientific speculation, the correctness of this metaphysical assumption is taken for granted, and the solution of this problem is tacitly relegated to future research. Scientists do not even agree on the evolutionary stage at which consciousness appeared. However, the belief that consciousness is limited to living organisms and that it requires a highly developed central nervous system represents a fundamental postulate of the materialistic and mechanistic world view. Consciousness is seen as the product of highly organized matter—the central nervous system—and as an epiphenomenon of physiological processes in the brain.6
The belief that consciousness is the product of the brain is, of course, not entirely arbitrary. It is based on a vast mass of observations from clinical and experimental neurology and psychiatry that suggest close connections between various aspects of consciousness and physiological or pathological processes in the brain, such as traumas, tumors, or infections. For example, a brain contusion or a lack of oxygen supply can result in the loss of consciousness. A tumor or a trauma of the temporal lobe involve certain distortions of conscious processes that are distinct and different from those associated with prefrontal lesions. Infections of the brain or administration of certain drugs with psychoactive properties, such as hypnotics, stimulants, or psychedelics, are conducive to quite characteristic alterations of consciousness. Occasionally the changes in consciousness associated with neurological disorders are so specific that they can contribute to correct diagnosis. Moreover, successful neurosurgery or other medical interventions can be followed by distinct clinical improvement.
These observations demonstrate beyond any doubt that there is a close connection between consciousness and the brain. However, they do not necessarily prove that consciousness is produced by the brain. The logic of the conclusion that mechanistic science has drawn is highly problematic, and it is certainly possible to imagine theoretical systems that would interpret the existing data in an entirely different way. This can be illustrated by such a simple example as a television set. The quality of the picture and sound is critically dependent on proper functioning of all the components, and malfunction or destruction of some of them will create very specific distortions. A television mechanic can identify the malfunctioning component on the basis of the nature of the distortion and correct the problem by replacing or repairing the hardware in question. None of us would see this as a scientific proof that the program must therefore be generated in the television set, since television is a man-made system and its functioning is well known. Yet, this is precisely the kind of conclusion mechanistic science has drawn in regard to brain and consciousness. It is interesting in this connection that Wilder Penfield (the world-famous neurosurgeon who has conducted ground-breaking brain research and has made fundamental contributions to modern neurophysiology) expressed in his last book, The Mystery of the Mind (1976), which summarizes his life work, a deep doubt that consciousness is a product of the brain and can be explained in terms of cerebral anatomy and physiology.
According to materialistic science, individual organisms are essentially separate systems that can communicate with the external world and with each other only through their sensory organs; all these communications are mediated by known forms of energy. Mental processes are explained in terms of reactions of the organism to the environment, and of creative recombinations of previous sensory input acquired in the course of the individual’s present lifetime and stored in the brain in the form of engrams. Here materialistic psychology uses the credo of the British empiricist school, expressed succinctly by John Locke (1823): “Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu.” (“There is nothing in the intellect that had not first been processed through the senses.”)
Because of the linear nature of time, past events are irretrievably lost, unless they are recorded in specific memory systems. Memories of any kind, then, require a specific material substrate— the cells of the central nervous system or the physiochemical code of the genes. Memories of events from the individual’s lifetime are stored in the memory banks of the central nervous system. Psychiatry has accepted the overwhelming clinical evidence that, in humans, these memories can be not only consciously retrieved, but also under certain circumstances, actually relived in a vivid and complex way. The only conceivable substrate for the transfer of ancestral and phylogenetic information is the physiochemical code of the DNA and RNA molecules. The present medical model recognizes the possibility of such transmission for the information concerning the mechanics of embryological development, constitutional factors, hereditary dispositions, parental characteristics or talents, and similar phenomena, but certainly not for complex memories of specific events preceding the individual’s conception.
Under the influence of the Freudian model, mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy have accepted the notion that the newborn child is a tabula rasa (“blank or erased tablet”) whose development is entirely determined by the sequences of childhood experiences. Contemporary medical theory denies the possibility that the experience of biological birth is recorded in the child’s memory; the usual reason given for this in medical handbooks is the immaturity of the cerebral cortex of the newborn (incomplete myelinization of the sheaths of the cerebral neurons). The only prenatal influences generally recognized in developmental speculations of psychiatrists and psychologists are heredity, vague constitutional factors, physical damage to the organism, and, possibly, differences in the relative strength of various instincts.
According to materialistic psychology, access to any new information is possible only through direct sensory input, and by recombining old data or combining them with new sensory input. Mechanistic science tries to explain even such phenomena as human intelligence, art, religion, ethics, and science itself as products of material processes in the brain. The probability that human intelligence developed all the way from the chemical ooze of the primeval ocean solely through sequences of random mechanical processes has been recently aptly compared to the probability of a tornado blowing through a gigantic junkyard and assembling by accident a 747 jumbo jet. This highly improbable assumption is a metaphysical statement that cannot be proved by existing scientific methods. Far from being a scientific piece of information—as its proponents so fiercely maintain—it is, in the present state of knowledge, little more than one of the leading myths of Western science.
Mechanistic science has had many decades of practice in defending its belief systems by labeling every major departure from perceptual and conceptual congruence with the Newtonian-Cartesian model as “psychosis” and all research generating incompatible data as “bad science.” This strategy has probably had the most immediate deleterious effects on the theory and practice of psychiatry. Contemporary psychiatric theory cannot adequately account for a wide range of phenomena that lie beyond the biographical realm of the unconscious, such as the perinatal and transpersonal experiences that are discussed in detail in this book.
Since intimate knowledge of transbiographical experiential realms is absolutely essential for a genuine understanding of most. of the problems psychiatry deals with, this situation has serious consequences. In particular, a deeper understanding of the psychotic process is virtually impossible without acknowledging the transpersonal dimensions of the psyche. Thus, the existing explanations either offer superficial and unconvincing psychodynamic interpretations, reducing the problems involved to biographical factors from early childhood, or postulate unknown biochemical factors to account for distortions of “objective reality” and other bizarre and incomprehensible manifestations.
The explanatory weakness of the old paradigm is even more obvious in regard to important sociocultural phenomena, such as shamanism, religion, mysticism, rites of passage, ancient mysteries, and healing ceremonies of various pre-industrial cultures. The present tendency to reduce mystical experiences and spiritual life to culturally accepted, quasi-psychotic states, primitive superstition, or unresolved conflicts and dependencies from childhood reveals a grave misunderstanding of their real nature. Freud’s attempt to equate religion with obsessive compulsive neurosis might at best be considered relevant in relation to one aspect of religion—the performance of rituals. However, it misses entirely the critical significance of first-hand visionary experiences of alternate realities for the development of all great religions. Equally dubious are the numerous theories inspired by psychoanalysis that try to explain historical events of apocalyptic proportions (such as wars, bloody revolutions, genocide, and totalitarian systems) as the result of childhood traumas and other biographical events of the persons involved.
The lack of explanatory power of the old models represents only one aspect of their negative role in psychiatry. They also exert a strong inhibiting effect on open-minded exploration of new observations and areas that appear to be incompatible with their basic assumptions about reality. This can be illustrated by the reluctance of mainstream psychology and psychiatry to accept an avalanche of data coming from many diverse sources, such as the practice of Jungian analysis and the new experiential psychotherapies, study of death experiences and near-death phenomena, psychedelic research, modern parapsychological studies, and reports of “visionary anthropologists.”
Rigid adherence to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm has had particularly detrimental consequences for the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy. It is largely responsible for the inappropriate application of the medical model to areas of psychiatry that deal with problems of living, rather than diseases. The image of the universe created by Western science is a pragmatically useful construct that helps to organize presently available observations and data. However, it has been generally mistaken for an accurate and comprehensive description of reality. As a result of this epistemological error, perceptual and cognitive congruence with the Newtonian-Cartesian world view is considered essential for mental health and normalcy.
Major deviations from this “accurate perception of reality” are then seen as indications of serious psychopathology, reflecting disorder or impairment of the sensory organs and the central nervous system, a medical condition, or a disease. In this context, nonordinary states of consciousness, with a few exceptions, are generally considered to be symptomatic of mental disorders. The very term “altered states of consciousness” clearly suggests that they represent distortions or bastardized versions of the correct perception of “objective reality.” Under these circumstances it would appear absurd to presume that such altered states have any ontological or gnoseological relevance. It would be equally unlikely to believe that these unusual states of mind, which are essentially pathological, could have any intrinsic therapeutic potential. Thus, the prevailing orientation in psychiatric therapy is to eliminate symptoms and unusual phenomena of any kind, and to return the individual to agreed-upon perceptions and experiences of the world.