Exploring The Frontiers of Science

Dr. Beverly Rubik is the former director of the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University. Through her work, Beverly has encouraged the networking of leading-edge scientists, medical doctors, scholars and psychologists and explored the frontier sciences, complimentary medicine, the relationship of mind and matter and geobiology.

DiCarlo: Could you explain to me the origins and purpose of the Center For Frontier Sciences?

Rubik: The Center was set up by the Temple University administration in 1987. The administrative team included the president of this state university, the provost and a few members of the board. Some of these individuals had prior experience with alternative medicines, and they wondered why no one in science was taking a look at these things. They wanted to explore not just alternative medicine but some other issues in science that they felt the scientific system had been closed to so they set up the Center for the Study of Frontier Issues in Science. That was the original name. The purpose of the center was simply to ask questions, not to advocate a certain position. In 1988 I was brought in to serve as Director. At the outset, I became the scapegoat for a lot of antagonism from the faculty, who were not involved with it from its inception. This created problems, but of course, all of that is behind us now.

DiCarlo: Are there any other university affiliated programs similar to yours?

Rubik: Just recently, two other centers for frontier sciences have started. At the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, they have a Center For Frontier Sciences which was inspired by our program and they have received a massive amount of funding from very conventional sources. It’s a much bigger program that what we have here. Also, there’s the new Center of Frontier Sciences at the University of Milano, Italy. They are going to follow three frontier areas -(1) alternative medicine or holistic medicine and biology , and (2) the physics and chemistry of new energy technologies, such as co-fusion, capillary fusion and energy from the vacuum, and (3) the history and philosophy of science.

DiCarlo: How many people or organizations are involved with the Center?

Rubik: It ranges above 3,000 affiliated scientists and scholars worldwide. Some of our affiliates are ordinary people who have an interest in alternative medicine, but I would say that most of them are scientists and scholars that I have met personally at meetings or that have heard me speak. So they are mainly colleagues in science, psychology and medicine that feel a kinship with these ideas and who are interested in exploring questions that go beyond the mainstream.

DiCarlo: You hold a monthly lecture series..what kinds of subjects are discussed?

Rubik: We bring in some very distinguished frontier scientists, some Nobel laureates, some lesser known but nonetheless doing interesting work. We have hosted a number of round-table international meetings on some key topics such as mind and matter; fields and living systems; homeopathy; and geobiology -the subtle interrelationship of life and the earth.

DiCarlo: In starting any kind of enterprise that challenges the status quo, you’d expect that there would resistance. The Center for Frontier Sciences is part of a major American University and I know you have had your share….Are you finding that there is more acceptance towards what you are doing than say 5 years ago?

Rubik: I would say that there is the usual benign neglect-that’s typical among academics. You know, scientists are trained specialists in some very narrow aspect of realty and they really do not know much beyond that. What’s more, they don’t care. The system doesn’t encourage them to think in broader terms. In fact, through promotions and tenure, the system rewards focussed thinking and only mainstream perspectives.

In the past I brought very distinguished scientists in to speak. To get people interested and involved, I held faculty lunches. As it turns out, we did get faculty members to attend, but it appeared that their main interest was to simply pick the brain of my visitors with questions that related to their own narrow area of research. I thought that was a reprehensible misuse of our visitors’ time, so I stopped having the luncheon meetings.

Keep in mind, this is your average state university. Faculty at other universities would have likely responded in the same way.

DiCarlo: What are the main areas of interest of the Center?

Rubik: There are three. First is the area of consciousness studies, that is, the interactions of the mind-through intention, will and beliefs-and the body and beyond to the larger sphere of the material world. That’s one area. The second area is complementary medicine or alternative medicine- particularly “energy” medicine. The third area is bioelectromagnetics, the interrelationship between living systems and electric and magnetic fields. Those three areas were selected because they are all testable. It’s not like the study of UFO’s where the evidence takes the form of people’s subjective experiences. We wanted to study areas in which we could collect hard physical evidence. There has been a certain amount of scholarly inquiry into these areas, and the anomalies, or events that cannot be explained by our conventional, scientific understanding of the world, keep piling up. Ultimately, these will lead us to a new world vision.

The mechanical vision of the universe has been useful, but I think it’s increasingly been one of the sources of our abuse of nature. We don’t really assist nature, we try to compete with nature or manipulate it and in so doing we often create imbalances. Consciousness, field interactions and energy medicine are the softer aspects or the feminine side of nature that have not really been addressed by science.

DiCarlo: Why have these areas been neglected?

Rubik: I think the system selects people who are very much like their prospective mentors-they have similar training backgrounds and look at things in much the same way. My way of looking at things was often in contrast to some of my former teachers.

DiCarlo: You are to be congratulated on all the prominent leading-edge scientists whom you have brought in to speak. Of all the people that have presented over the past few years, who most sticks out in your mind as having impressed you the most?

Rubik: That’s hard to say. There’s certainly been a number of very good talks. I think the talk by the great physicist David Bohm was very profound. He gave an overview of his idea of information as the bridge between mind and matter. Bohm’s idea of information is so very different from the materialistic view of information used in the computer sciences. In Bohm’s view, information is something that’s really not physical. That’s a view I share. Information is something which has meaning and is communicated. My voice is the carrier of the words, and the actual words contain the meaning which is intangible. To state that information is the bridge between the mind and the material realm is a very rich way of thinking because all entities in the universe have information. They have something to tell us. But in order to get that information, we have to ask new questions. When we do, the answers that follow will reveal new insights. So I really thought that Bohm’s talk about the notion of “active information”-that’s the term he uses-was quite an eye opener. It’s a very different way of thinking about information.

DiCarlo: Have there been any other visitors whose work has impressed you?

Rubik: I think the experimental work Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunn at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory is certainly important. They have shown that people can skew the numbers on a random number generator towards higher or lower values by simply wishing them to be high or low, respectively. It’s one of those exceptions to the traditional scientific world view about the way things are that we simply can’t explain using the old framework. Their data is a real challenge to the prevailing paradigm. They have shown that mental intention can interact with random physical systems whether they are mechanical, electronic, or radioactive. It’s fascinating work, and all of the data pooled together shows high statistical significance. Although their 15 years worth of work is extremely solid-it is so solid that no one can contest it anymore-it has certainly not changed the view of the mainstream. Unfortunately, it has not gained them any respect at Princeton University either.

DiCarlo: I am surprised they’ve been able to get funding for such a long time…

Rubik: I believe they have had funding from the aerospace industry. Robert Jahn is such a distinguished aerospace engineer that he’s been an on-going consultant to NASA. But for most researchers, obtaining adequate funding for frontier type research is an extraordinary problem.

DiCarlo: Why is there such resistance to accepting these kinds of studies? Aren’t they bringing us new discoveries and expanding our understanding of reality?

Rubik: Originally I thought the lack of acceptance was due to the fact that the data was scanty or people didn’t know about it . Most of these studies are not published in the mainstream journals, so it’s hardly accessible to the traditional scientific community. But I sense that something much deeper is at play here because I have been bringing this data to the attention of the mainstream in meetings at Temple and elsewhere in the world for six years now. So it’s not simply a matter of being uninformed.

I really think it’s about the scientific world view-the conventional, materialistic reductionistic world view-which is being challenged. Keep in mind it is the scientists themselves who form the world view. Any challenge to the world view is actually a direct assault on them-on who they are- so it becomes a highly emotional, irrational thing. I have seen it happen a lot. It’s not simply about some lofty ideas. This challenges the essence of who people are in this culture. So the real work involves planting a seed in their minds that there is something more to themselves and reality than they had previously thought. And that takes time.

I remember planting such a seed 10 or 15 years ago when I was in California . I was talking to a scientist about my interests and my work and I could see he was very uncomfortable with the topics. He dismissed what I was saying. Twelve years later I spotted him at a meeting. He came up to me and asked me whether I remembered him. “Yes, I of course I remember you,” I said. I’m surprised to see you here.” He said, “I came here because I saw your name in the program.” “Well,” I responded, “twelve years ago you weren’t interested in these things.” And he said, “I am now, thanks to you.” So, things happen. You plant a seed in people and it settles down into some deep substratum of the mind. Over time, it starts to grow and suddenly it becomes conscious and they’re interested in these things many years later as they themselves have changed in response to these new ideas.

The thing about a paradigm shift-and Thomas Kuhn talked about it at length-is that it’s not something that’s just an intellectual change of mind. It’s a deep conversion experience. It’s more like a religious shift inside a person. So this work of mediating between paradigms and bringing data to the attention of others and hoping that they will change their minds is very slow work . It doesn’t happen overnight and it’s more like being a missionary worker.

The younger generation of scientists, who are more open minded, who do not have a vested interest in the dogma, and who are able to appreciate the importance of the new world view will of course more easily embrace these ideas. Ultimately, these younger scientists will replace those who are older and that’s how world views will shift. Niels Bohr wrote, “Science advances funeral by funeral.”

DiCarlo: You’ve mentioned the difficulty a scientist on the leading-edge may have obtaining research funds. What are some of the other penalties facing scientists who choose to do paradigm busting work?

Rubik: There are quite a lot of extraordinary things. In essence, nothing is new. Scientists who do this kind of research go the route of Galileo and Copernicus- they are excommunicated from the flock. In his day, Galileo was considered a heretic by the Church. Isn’t it strange that only two years ago the Pope, sitting in Rome today proclaimed that Galileo was finally, “OK”-absolved, 300 years later. It was on the news. Galileo was regarded as a heretic and excommunicated. Copernicus was excommunicated. These people defied the Church’s view of the earth being at the center of the universe. They saw new evidence: Galileo saw moons moving around Jupiter, but his contemporaries refused to look through his telescope.

Even though we don’t have the Catholic Church over our heads anymore, we have the “Church of Science,” which is almost like the Catholic Church, you know. Those who dare to challenge the dogmas of the Church of Science find themselves essentially excommunicated. They are cut-off from their peers. Isolated. Their funding is removed. In fact, those very words “excommunication” were used to described Jacques Beuveniste, a French scientist who six years ago published a paper in the distinguished journal Nature showing that very dilute solutions-so dilute that there should be no molecules of any effective substance-could produce real biochemical effects on blood cells. Beuveniste has been subtlely silenced by the scientific community. Scientists who are treated this way find that they can no longer get grants and this means they will lose their graduate assistants, who are their arms who carry out the laboratory research They are not allowed to publish in the peer-reviewed, mainstream journals that most scientists make the time to read.

There is another example involving a very distinguished American scientist, Linus Pauling. Pauling is a double Nobel laureate -he has a Nobel prize in chemistry as well as in peace. He thinks that Vitamin C in high doses might help prevent the common cold and might also extend the lives of cancer patients, giving them quality time. Because of this, he has been unable to publish in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, despite the fact that he is a member of the Academy. Those in power made specific rules to keep him from expressing his views, which are considered dangerous to young minds.

People with points of view that conflict with the paradigm find their research papers have been rejected based upon unreasonable logic such as, “lack of readership interest”. But, it’s really an unfair way of censoring the work without giving it peer review. There is no real peer review when you’re challenging the paradigm. There are a lot of underhanded ways of dealing with people who have threatening points of view.

DiCarlo: Well, to read Thomas Kuhn’s account of paradigm change is one thing, but to see it actually playing itself out in front of you is something altogether different.

Rubik: The sad thing is that most American scientists have not studied the history or philosophy of science. It’s not part of the curriculum. You get a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Science and you’ve never had a single philosophy of science course! That’s very peculiar, isn’t it, but that’s how most universities are. They simply produce trained technicians, able to conduct experiments that they then analyze using statistics. When I enrolled in a philosophy of science graduate course at the University of California at Berkeley over 20 years ago, I was laughed at by my superiors. They said, “Why are you wasting your time taking these classes?” I was dismissed as a kook.

DiCarlo: Given everything you said, do you think that a lot of the changes that will take place in the scientific community then will come from the outside rather than the inside?

Rubik: Well, Robert Becker is an example of change coming from the outside-in. Twenty years go Becker was doing research on electromagnetic fields and the regeneration of amputated limbs on animals. As a result of his work, which showed profound biological effects from weak electromagnetic fields, he became concerned about the possible health risks associated with people who live next to high voltage power lines. He found it very difficult to get money from the government to study this and the military had silenced a lot of his reports. So he wrote several popular books on the subject that activated and aroused the general public. People began openly expressing their concerns about the increased risk of cancer to their congressmen, and research monies became available soon thereafter. When consumer groups start clamoring and making noise, then change happens. I think that’s a good strategy for making a paradigm shift today, whether it’s in medicine or in new energy technology. The scientific community is much more conservative and hard to shake. I didn’t use to believe this, by the way, but I do now.

DiCarlo: You have acknowledged that some of the ideas of alternative medicine challenge the very foundations of science. What are some of those ideas?

Rubik: For example, issues of the spirit. A human being may or may not be a spiritual believer or have some spiritual life and that could very much play a part in his or her healing response. Even one’s belief about death is not taken into account by conventional medicine. Moreover, the realms of spirit are not addressed by science, that’s again the 300 year old debate which can be traced back to Galileo. There is still a rift between science and spirit.

Another example is consciousness. The role of the health care provider has been that of the technician administering the techniques for the patient to get well. It would be much more powerful if the consciousness of the practitioner and the patient were aligned in a kind of partnership. In alternative medicines, there is often a much closer relationship between the patient and the practitioner. This may help facilitate the healing response. Conventional science does not pay attention to issues of consciousness because it doesn’t believe consciousness can have any active consequences in physical reality, which of course would include physical health and healing.

If we are going to take issues of spirit and consciousness into account in order to study the full efficacy of alternative medicine, then how do we do it using a science in which they have no importance? Furthermore, there is no scientific foundation at all on which to study the nonmaterial realm.

Before we do all of these experiments we need to bring this up front and discuss it. Ethnomedicines that are non-Western have very different assumptions underlying them which do not fit in with Western scientific assumptions. For example, in Chinese medicine, the mind and body is one. There are serious philosophical discrepencies between Western science and these different ethnomedical systems.

Western science is not a universal system of truth testing. It really is bound by its own cultural context, its own system of values and its own hidden assumptions. We need to extend science so that we can accommodate other ethnomedicine systems in their fullness in order to study them. We need to recognize that these are really complete systems on their own, with different assumptions. If we try to test them, we need to give full respect to their depth and their differences.

DiCarlo: I see what you mean. It has always struck me that when Western science studies acupuncture, let’s say, we try to explain its effects in terms of neurotransmitters and bodily produced chemicals, which fall within the realm of traditional science-chemistry and biology. In Eastern culture there’s a whole different explanation as to why acupuncture might work.

Rubik: That’s exactly right . I was asked once to give a lecture to American Academy of Medical Acupuncture on that very topic. In the talk I stated, “Who are we to think that a 300 year old system of thinking is vastly superior to a 4,000 year old way of practicing medicine and thinking about the body? Who are we to have such arrogance?” I don’t see one-to-one correspondences between Western science and Chinese philosophy. We find, for example, that when acupuncture needles are inserted to diminish pain, natural pain-killing endorphins which have been produced by the body can be found at the site of the needles, in the spinal cord and even in the brain. But that doesn’t mean that all of the effects of acupuncture are explainable in terms of ordinary Western science concepts. Maybe in the long run they will be, but certainly not now. We have no way of explaining why stimulating the crown of the head is helpful in treating hemorrhoids. We have no way of explaining that kind of nonlocal interconnectedness of the body. Western science has no explanation at all, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that we do.

DiCarlo: These Eastern traditions oftentimes speak in terms of fields of energy. Do you think that’s a metaphor or do you think there is an element of truth to that?

Rubik: I think there’s an element of reality to that. You can experience that if you do some Qi Gong or T’ai Chi exercises. You can easily experience the sensation of energy between your hands. If you move your hands slowly together then apart for about 5 minutes, you will feel a ball of energy between them. It’s like bringing two North poles of a magnet together and feeling the resistance. Everybody experiences that, yet the Westerner will say , “Am I imagining this, or is is it really in my body?” And that’s a question only a Westerner would ask because in the East they don’t distinguish between your mind and your body. Right away, we slip into our Cartesian duality and try to explain it, “Well, it’s just a mental thing. It’s not real.”

But actually, I think there are some parallels between, let’s say, the physical fields that we know in physics and acupuncture. One of the things about acupuncture points is that they conduct electricity more than the surrounding tissues. That’s how people who are not good at acupuncture find the points. They have what is called a point finder, an electrical device that they move around until they find a place of low resistance or high electrical conductivity, and that’s where they insert the needle. There’s no way of looking at the body and knowing. Of course, the real master of acupuncture in China can feel the energy and its blocks and knows where to put the needle. They don’t have to use a point finder. So it seems that there is some relation between electromagnetic fields and acupuncture but the exact nature of that relationship is not well understood yet.

DiCarlo: Has there been any good scientific work done to demonstrate the existence of the human energy field?

Rubik: I’m intrigued by some work done in Germany. In fact I’ve gone over there to work with Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp. This involves extremely low level light that the body and all organisms emit which might be called an aura. However, I don’t know if it’s the same aura that people who are psychic claim to see, because this is a real physically measurable energy. Though it’s visible light, it’s not something that you can see easily with the naked eye. Popp uses very sensitive detectors that can count the photons, the particles of light coming out of the body. I think that this may be one of the manifestations of the energy dynamics of life. For example, in the Popp laboratory they have demonstrated that the light to a large extent is coherent like a laser. That means that the light probably has a capacity for carrying information, unlike incoherent light. If that’s the case, it’s probably not some junk radiation, which is the mainstream opinion. I think that the light, if it’s coherent, may be involved in both an internal communication system as well as an external one that conveys signals between living things.

It’s interesting that in studying the cancer tissues of patients, they have found losses of coherence in the light. Perhaps the light has lost informational value and cannot communicate with the other cells and that’s why the tissues grow abnormally.

I did some experiments to explore communication between two cultures of single-celled algae that glow. When I disturbed one of them with a chemical stressor, it emitted a burst of light. Almost simultaneously, the second culture that was in a separate container emitted light too. You could see it with your eyes. It was almost as if it was communicating with the first culture. After doing experiments like that for a month, I am intrigued that there is something here.

I think the idea of this biophoton field is just an indicator of some some deeper field in the organism. When an organism dies, it gives up a burst of light. There have also been a lot of interesting findings by German and Japanese researchers that would seem to echo some of the old Hindu ideas about the chakras. Researchers have discovered, for example, that the areas near the forehead, throat and heart have increased photon emission compared to non-chakra regions of the body.

So there’s been a number of research laboratories documenting that there are energy dynamics associated with the body which seem to support the wisdom of ancient cultures. To me, this convergence of the new information from frontier science and old perennial wisdom is fascinating.

DiCarlo: You have mentioned that there are certain scientists who are arrogant and perhaps closed minded. What do you feel are the essential qualities and characteristics that make for a good scientist?

Rubik: I think it is very important to neither be believer nor a disbeliever. It’s a very narrow line to stand on, but I think the best position to be with respect to old data and new data-the mainstream thinking and the frontier thinking-is to stand on the fine line between them. This is the position of the non-believer. But at the same time try to stay open. I want to ask as many questions as possible which challenges all sides-mainstream, frontier and even fringe ideas. Unfortunately, that’s not a popular place to be. When I put myself in that place and go the mainstream, they often accuse me of being too frontier. When I go to the frontier science meetings and challenge them with questions, they accuse me of being too mainstream. But it’s really the best place to be because you don’t stop asking questions. Science is driven by questions and we must never stop asking questions. I feel where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. We can never say, “We now we have it . This is the truth.” This is the problem even with the frontier scientists-many have become true believers in a particular system. I’ve actually encountered violence while I attended the meetings of some groups. One individual threw a journal in my face in response to my question. He got so upset because he was a true believer. I began to understand he wasn’t interested in bridging his work to the mainstream of everyday science. He, and others like him, want to be seen as mavericks bucking the system.

That’s definitely one type of frontier scientist. Others would like to see their work merged into the mainstream, but they don’t know how to do it. They often take an intense fighting posture in their writing and language and instead of building bridges they actually cut themselves off. I see various different ways in which people destroy their chances of trying to bring their work into the mainstream, but usually it’s because of an, “I’m right and you’re wrong” attitude. Anytime we have that, I think we lose the art of being a scientist, which is never to believe in what you have have found. Science is about being humble rather than being arrogant, because you know that what you have found is only part of an even bigger picture and that there are many, many more questions that will lead to an even greater unfolding of our knowledge. I believe that our science will never be complete, because I think as God’s creation, it is deep and unfathomable, like divinity.

Over a 100 years ago, one of the Deans of Harvard University said our science is nearly complete and he tried to discourage students from going into science as he felt there was nothing more to do. That was before quantum and relativity theory! This notion has come up over and over again in history and the present is no different. We think it’s almost finished now-we just need a unified field theory and that’s it folks-we have everything. I think this is nonsense. We should be encouraging all of our students not to memorize and regurgitate scientific dogma, but to ask new questions. We should ask them to go inside themselves and rely on their own intuition and come up with their own personal questions to ask of nature. I think that nature is so complex and creatively evolving that if all of us were asking questions, we would never unfold all the available knowledge. But of course, that’s more of a religious belief on my part. I see that nature is filled with divinity and being filled with divinity, it is infinitely complex. So we will never know it all, but we have to keep asking new questions.

DiCarlo: I’m wondering what role does the inner state of the scientist play in experimentation in scientific inquiry?

Rubik: I think that our inner state and our own beliefs and ideas, the things that make us unique, contribute to the specific questions we pose in science and determine the kinds of things we are going to see in the world. We are all looking for self-reflections of who we are, perhaps that is all we can really “see.” I’ll give you an example. I know an Italian physicist who is a Marxist that also believes that collective human behavior makes for good societies. When he looks at atoms and molecules he “sees” that they behave cooperatively. As a result, he asks questions relative to the cooperative behaviors of atoms and molecules.

DiCarlo: Well is it conceivable that our beliefs could actually affect the outcomes of our scientific experiments?

Rubik: Yes. There are some very famous examples of that historically. I’ll mention one for you. It’s really one of the most outrageous. One of the most famous microphysicists in the history of science was the 17th Century Dutchman named Van Leeuwenhoek. He and his contemporaries were among the first few people to look through a microscope. When they looked at human sperm, they saw, inside the heads of the sperm, little babies. Now that’s a wild idea. Today we no longer see little babies, but everybody saw little babies inside the sperm heads at this time because the world view for 2,000 years up to that time was that men planted little babies inside the bodies of women where they incubated until birth. Of course, they were going to see little babies in the sperm and everybody agreed it was so. They were even comparing the little babies, one from another under the microscope. I mean it’s amazing that they all saw this simply because everybody believed it. It just shows you the power of collective expectation and belief, of intersubjective consensus, and how it can influence what a whole society perceives.

I wonder today what collective beliefs we share that force us to see data in a certain configuration because we cannot divorce ourselves from certain beliefs. What questions do we dare not pose about nature because they would so threaten our own beliefs? We should look deeply inside ourselves regarding these things, but it’s very had to do. It’s very hard to step outside of our own culture, with all its underlying assumptions, beliefs and expectations, to do this. That’s why I think it’s important for scientists to meditate and to enter the void of their own minds to be able to transcend some of their own shortcomings as individuals within their communities.

In the deepest sense, true scientists are really mystics and I don’t mean that in the trivial sense, such as in gazing into a crystal ball to foretell the future. I mean that they are on the road to inner, self-awareness and development of their full human potential. Because of this, their questions about nature will change as they themselves change. The real act of being, let’s say, a yogi of knowledge-which the scientist is-is to know thyself. I think that’s one of the first premises. I think it’s human nature that we project what’s inside ourselves out into the cosmos. We project it externally and then we think it’s objective, but really it’s only a means of letting us see more of who we are inside, and working out our interior problems in the external world.

DiCarlo: What are the three frontier areas of science telling us?

Rubik: They tell us that there is a new paradigm emerging. It’s not yet finished, and everybody has a slightly different version of what it looks like, but the paradigm is about the new views of life in the whole universe. The whole universe itself, the whole cosmos, is a living, dynamical being. The universe is not just a clockwork mechanism. It has creativity built into it . It’s changing, it’s dynamic, it’s evolving more complexity and more richness and beauty all of the time.

We’re coming to realize that life wasn’t just something that happened once on this tiny planet. We shouldn’t think that we are that special in the universe. The universe was destined to produce conscious life from its very inception. There’s a lot of factors that entered into the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang, onwards and the factors were coordinated just precisely so that we have an interesting living universe. It could have expanded into a dust cloud, or collapsed back into a speck of dust, but the dynamics were so balanced that it initially produced heavy elements, eventually planets and then life forms. Eventually conscious life forms developed.

In my view, the universe actually had some rudimentary consciousness from its inception. This whole question of, “Is mind separate from matter”, or “when did consciousness begin?” to me is a moot question. I really think that consciousness was always there and the evolution toward greater consciousness was purposefully built into the cosmic design. Now that becomes almost a religious issue, but that’s my own position on it and in my view, the emerging paradigm is really telling us that life has a lot of subtle characteristics that involve numerous relationships. An organism is dynamic. It has energy properties that have not yet been considered very much. Life is linked in its many rhythms to the earth, biosphere,the sun, and even the cosmos at large. So the emerging paradigm considers life to be a deep principal of the universe. It’s the primary principal. We exist in a nurturing, caring universe that wanted to develop life from its inception and that can sustain us. Nature is not something we should be fighting against and feeling alienated from but it’s very much a part of who we are. If we embrace that point of view-that we exist in a very nurturing place-I think it can lead us to a new renaissance.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.