In a provocative article in Smithsonian Magazine by Ron Rosenbaum, he describes a luncheon meeting with Lisa Randall, the Harvard-tenured theoretical physicist and cosmologist on the subject of dark matter and dark energy, those mysterious entities that make up 96% of the universe.

It is a fine interview, but cosmic mysteries aside for a moment, what could be more interesting to our work here at UPR is where the conversation went following lunch and into the dessert phase. Rosenbaum brought up the question of inner space rather than outer space and here is where the conversation went:

“Although Randall’s work takes her thoughts into outer space, it is a question about another dimension, inner space, that she gives the most elaborate answer to during our lunch. The subject comes up near the end, as she is spearing forkfuls of my blueberry cobbler. I ask her about human consciousness—the dark matter within us—namely whether she has thought about the mind/brain question: Is the mind the product of the brain, all our thoughts neurochemically determined (as the “materialists” say), or is the mind not a slave of the physical brain, somehow capable of free will (as the “dualists” believe)? Or can we never answer that question? The philosopher Colin McGinn calls himself a “Mysterian” as an homage to the ’60s one-hit wonder band (“96 Tears”) Question Mark & The Mysterians because he thinks our consciousness may never be capable of comprehending the mystery of its own nature.

Randall seems to take McGinn’s argument as a challenge: “First, I think it’s always a mistake to say ‘never,’ because we probably can understand a lot more about it even if we don’t ultimately understand it. Second, we haven’t been trying to answer this question for a very long time. We understand a lot of things now that we didn’t understand before. And it’s terrifically hard, because we don’t even know what we mean by consciousness.”

What Randall talks about when she talks about consciousness is a continuum.

“I do think one mistake we often make is we think of it as a binary thing, like we’re either conscious or not conscious. I think there’s a spectrum of consciousness and I think it’s interesting to study that—the difference between a plant and a dog, the difference between a dog and a baby, between a baby and a slightly older human… I think it’s sort of a continuum.” Looking at it that way, she says, “would be a good start.”

The notion of consciousness as a continuum is, I believe, central to a proper place to examine its nature and by extension, our nature as well. What we call genius, in all fields of endeavor, should be properly understood as an example of a continuum of consciousness, just as there exists a lower scale of consciousness in some people and in animal and even plant life. For example, watching the movements of a paramecium under the microscope we would have to agree that it possesses a certain degree of consciousness as it looks for nourishment and avoids danger. When a tree develops a chemical weapon in its leaves to ward off insects it too displays a degree of consciousness on the continuum.

That human beings are capable of broadening their consciousness in the continuum is not only a function of evolution but can also be self-aware, intentional, and a self-developing and self-enhancing attribute of our nature. In that sense we are unique in nature. And as we learn in the work of geniuses like Lisa Randall and her fellow explorers of the universe, we come ever closer to the unanswered question: what is consciousness? In exploring that question we acknowledge the importance of the word “Research” in the name of this university.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Lisa-Randalls-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-208338141.html?c=y&story=fullstory

In the latest issue of “The New York Review of books,” Michael Greenberg reviews Hallucinations (knopf), the latest book by neurologist and physician Oliver Sacks. The review begins with this passage:

Oliver Sacks is the scientist-as-artist, a rare species nowadays but one that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century and that almost single-handedly he has kept alive. His sensibility is Victorian in the best meaning of the word: reformist, literary, historical—empirical of course but speculative as well, in the tradition of the grand theorists of that less specialized time. As a neurologist, Sacks is a clinician above all, an unusually close listener to his patients’ symptoms and stories. He prefers to look through a wide-angle lens rather than a microscope. His impulse is to amplify his observations, to look beyond the minute workings of the brain to the varieties of human experience itself, something he has done much to map out in the medical case histories that comprise the core of his finest writing.

This isn’t to suggest that he doesn’t value the groundbreaking research of neuroscience’s current pioneers, who are in the process of adding, in steady increments, to our understanding of memory and perception, but rather that his particular mission, as I suspect he sees it, is to apply their findings philosophically, to the soul.

Although this introduction appears at first to fall closer to the empiricist and scientific rather than philosophical and esoteric spectrum, I would argue that this description of one of our most important observers of the human condition may well serve as a role model for much of what we teachers and students do at UPR.

The philosophy and psychology we teach and study also moves in a continuum of human knowledge and condition, one which in the broader world moves from the strictly material and empirical through the subjective, speculative, esoteric to mystical nature of what it means to be fully human.

We here are constantly judging and being judged as to where on this continuum we live and work. It should be clear enough that this university, arising from and connected to the Philosophical Research Society, celebrates the esoteric and mystical as it is reflected in the wisdom traditions of world cultures. It is also clear that as such, our identity confronts a historical tendency away from the wisdom traditions in favor of scientific and empirical knowledge, both increasingly reductionist in character.

What Oliver Sacks represents is, I would argue, an effective and accurate measure of how to confront that reductionism. His work holds out the possibility of a sacred, even mystical element that we here regard as both true and necessary if humanity is to survive and be fully human. And what is the salient quality that Sacks displays? It is wonder, that underpinning of all genuine philosophic inquiry, and that quality or temperament that makes us human. But we also have to recognize that this new book is entitled Hallucinations, which are defined as sensory experiences of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by hallucinogenics, or by what sacred peoples call entheogens, or “being with the god.”

Sacks understands that in these disorders and extreme alterations of what we call “normal,”  there are signs and symbols of experience that are sometimes evocative of the transcendental. Here, for example, is a description from  the writer Elissa Schappell describing her experience of a seizure:

I am suddenly serene … rising. There is the unseen life, the illuminated world, shimmering, flooded with more light than seems possible, rushing into my palms and the soles of my feet, the air liquid with light, so much I should be able to scoop it into my hands like water. It fills the corners of the room, runs down the walls. I am ecstatic. I don’t want it to end. Not now, not yet, just as I’m about to understand something.

As onlookers we are terrified by the sight of a seizure, and yet what are we to make of this description? For Sacks, this is the journey he is celebrating as a physician, and one we too can celebrate. Greenberg ends his review with this paragraph:

This chasm between actual and socially accepted experience is exactly what Sacks, with his gift for listening to his patients, is able to pick up. Throughout his long career, the transcribing of his patients’ experiences has been a kind of necessity, the truest way to comprehend and “come to terms with them emotionally.” This unique attentiveness has not only amplified our understanding of the range of human experience, it has elevated his investigations into the realm of art.

I would argue that the range of human experience here is not just in the realm of art, but also in the realm of philosophy and transformative psychology as well, and that Sacks is a genuine role model for the work of this university because he begins with a respect for the empirical but is drawn by wonder and temperament to a higher plane, one which we also seek to occupy.

by Richard Geldard, Ph.D.

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Program Dean for Transformational Psychology at the University of Philosphical Research, discusses the M.A. Program in Transformational Psychology and UPR’s unique approach to the subject.

The Olympic games are named after mount Olympus in Greece, the home of the Greek gods. They are rooted in Greek legend, a time for the gods to enjoy the delight of play and of the display of physical prowess in friendly competition. According to Greek mythology, the earliest such games were played by lesser gods known as the Dactyls. The dactyl Heracles raced with his two brothers. He crowned the victor with a laurel wreath. Following this, all the Olympian gods participated in friendly contests of  wrestling, running and jumping. There are other myths relating to the origin of these games but they all pertain to a vision of joyful feats of physical prowess.

The Greeks held to an ideal of “a perfect mind in a perfect body” and the Olympics were made into an occasion for the display of physical perfection. The earliest Olympic games among the Greeks were held at least as far back as 8th c. BCE in Olympia on the Peloponnesos peninsula. Women and slaves were not allowed in these games, which were held in honor of Zeus. The earliest games in Olympia for women go back to the 6th c. BCE and took the form of running races to gain the privilege of being a priestess for the goddess Hera. A parallel contest for the men was conducted to choose a consort for the priestess to aid in the religious rites.  Being a display of the body beautiful, the tradition of physical nudity was introduced to games in the 8th c. BCE, perhaps by the Spartans, and was adopted early in the Olympics. This celebration of the beauty of physical form also took a cultural turn, with famous sculptors vying to outdo each other in depicting the athletes in their sculptures.

The various city-states of ancient Greece participated in these games,  for which any warring states stopped their conflict to follow the Olympic Truce, so that participants and viewers received safe passage and the human ideal represented by the games was honored over regional or personal differences. From an early stage (and perhaps from the inception), the games were held every four years, a unit of time known as the olympiad, which was used in state reckonings. The ancient Greek Olympics continued after Greece came under Roman rule, until the late 4th c., when the Roman emperor Theodosius I put a stop to them as part of a suppression of paganism in favor of making  Christianity the state religion.

In modern times, the first significant attempt to revive the Olympics occurred in Revolutionary France between 1796-1798. There were a few more attempts in between but the modern Olympics was initiated after the founding of the International Olympic Committee by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1890. The first modern international Olympics were held in Athens, Greece in 1896. Fourteen nations with 241 athletes participated. The tradition of holding the games once every four years was also revived. Based on earlier articles of the British Olympic Foundation, the International Olympic Charter was adopted. This charter aimed to maintain the spirit of friendly celebration of the powers of the human body in joyful competitive sports in which the spirit of goodwill predominated over success and failure. Since the 1896 Athens Olympics, there have been 27 Olympics in four year intervals with three interruptions due to World Wars I and II. Though the Summer Olympics are considered the main international event, there are also Winter Olympics, now in two-year intervals from the Summer Olympics.

With the present Olympics, London U.K. has hosted the games thrice and altogether 43 nations have hosted the games and most nations of the world participate. Los Angeles has hosted the games twice, in 1932 and 1984. The largest number of records in athletic performance have been and continue to be broken during these games, in keeping with the spirit of physical perfection of the human being worldwide which they are meant to showcase.

From a pan-Grecian recurrent memorialization of an aspect of the human ideal, we have moved into a global celebration. The Olympics today represents a planet-wide acknowledgment of the human urge to perfection, enacted at the physical level. Similarly, UPR, a contemporary wisdom academy, celebrates in its curricula and educational programs an integral ideal of perpetual human progress. Though physical skill is certainly a universal aspect of this ideal, UPR exists to further the powers of mind and spirit which inhabit the body and are in profound need of development and exercise if we are to live harmoniously together as human beings on and with the earth. UPR mines the wisdom traditions of the world, including that of ancient Greece, India, China, East and West Asia and other cultural heritages and engages these with new emergent knowledge paradigms to seek solutions to the problems of our times. Our Master’s programs in Consciousness Studies and Transformational Psychology are meant to prepare global citizens with the skills and capacities to navigate the planet towards a more sustainable and holistic future.