by Tim Miejan

Renowned mathematician, physicist and psychologist Peter Russell, a former student of Stephen Hawking as well as a student of meditation and Eastern philosophy, currently is touring the nation in promotion of his latest book, From Science to God, an autobiographical treatise on the divergent paths of science and consciousness and how he expects them to converge.

A corporate teacher on self-development, creativity, stress management and sustainable environmental practices, Russell has explored those themes in prior books -- The TM Technique, The Brain Book, The Global Brain Awakens, The Creative Manager, The Conscious Revolution, and Waking Up in Time. In his latest work, he explores the paradigms and underlying metaparadigms that are shaping the evolution of human consciousness.

This futurist will return to the Twin Cities February 1-3 to present a workshop for members of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, 4537 Third Ave. S., in Minneapolis. His talk at Mass at 9 and 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 3 is open to the public.

In a telephone interview with The EDGE, Peter Russell revealed a wealth of personal experience in exploring consciousness through meditation and study of ancient mystics, but don't call him a "New Age" scholar. Not only does he express disdain for the "New Age" label mistakenly thrust upon him, but he refuses to buy into any belief system to explain the unexplained.

Peter Russell: I'm not in the New Age category, but people always put me in that, time and time again. I think part of my work is trying not to believe in anything. What I mean by that is not to get stuck in any belief system about the world. I think that can be the dangerous thing, when we think we know what it's all about. I think a lot of the New Age is people getting into a certain fixed belief system, whether it's astrology or reincarnation. This isn't truth, but just another way of believing.

There's a story I was going to put in the book, but it didn't get in. I was going to do another whole section on our attachment to beliefs. There's a wonderful story, I think it's Sufi, about God and the devil taking a walk one day. And God bends down and picks something up from the ground and says, "Oh, look at this: a piece of truth!"

Then he goes on and says, "Oh, here's another piece of truth! And here's another." He keeps picking up truth and says to the devil, "Doesn't it worry you that the truth is so obvious to see, that it's everywhere?"

And the devil says, "Not really, with a little help from me, they soon turn the truth into a belief."

What I mean by that, for me is, I try to look at my own experience and what feels real rather than get into any particular system. It's hard, because there are always beliefs underneath it, but I try to catch those beliefs when I have them."

Would you say it's a danger for people to have particular beliefs?

Peter Russell: It's not a danger to have them, but it's a danger to have beliefs and feel they are the only truth, or to be closed to other ways of seeing things, or that you have the ultimate answer. I don't think any of us has the ultimate answer.

There are as many ways to view reality as there are people.

Russell: There are as many ways as there are people, and as many ways as there are days in the lives of people, because we all change how we see things.

For me, instead of beliefs what I have are working assumptions -- a working assumption of how things are. It has less of a fixed quality to it.

How would you describe your current working assumption of how things are?

Russell: My current working assumption of life, the universe and everything. That's a big question.

You could probably write a book on that one! Do you believe we create our physical reality?

Russell: I don't believe we create the physical reality. The physical reality, whatever it is, exists independent of our observation of it, apart from some subtle aspects of quantum mechanics. But leaving that aside, what we do create is our particular perception of that reality -- and then believe that is THE reality.

When I say we don't know what physical reality is, I think that's coming out of physics. What we think is solid matter we know is largely empty space. Whatever physical reality is, it isn't like we perceive it. What we perceive is a creation in our own mind. And generally, we perceive similar things. Our brains are wired in a similar way. But if you put yourself in a mind of a dolphin, you might experience a different reality.

So I'm very exact on that point. We create our exterior physical reality, and then we confuse that with the actual reality.

Which is easy to do.

Russell: Oh yes, very easy to do. That's how we live life. We think we're seeing the world out there as it is, but we forget what we're seeing is a creation. As I say in the book, I think that's what the Indian concept of maya is about, the illusion. It's not so much an illusion but a delusion. What we see is real -- it's not an illusion -- but we delude ourselves that what we think we see is the actual reality.

The other side of that is, that shows the creative power of consciousness. That all we're experiencing is arising in the mind in every second, every fraction of a second, we are creating for ourselves this wonderfully rich visual, auditory, sensory experience of the world. And all of what we're experiencing is coming out of consciousness.

And that goes back to the St. Augustine quote. One of the great models of consciousness is not just that we're aware, but this whole experience arises in consciousness. I think that's what a lot of the great mystics have explored in their own way. By going inside of themselves, they explore that arising of experiences, that arising of consciousness.

A major theme in your book, From Science to God, is shifting paradigms.

Russell: It almost comes out of what we're just talking about, in terms of our perception of reality. Because we confuse the two, we think that what we're observing is the physical reality, therefore we think the physical reality is the real world. Science, for the last few hundred years in our culture, has been exploring that physical world -- measuring it and examining it -- and has learned an awful lot about that world, from atomic structures to things on the outside of the universe to DNA. We're understanding so much about how that physical universe works and is like. A part of that is realizing it's not how we see it, but is quite different.

Because of that, we come up with an understanding of the physical world in terms of space, time and matter. And then science makes the false assumption that everything can be explained in terms of physical reality. As soon as we fully understand the physical world, we will understand everything -- including, and this is where I think the assumption is wrong, how the human mind works.

What I find interesting is that in spite of all of the success of modern science in explaining how the physical world operates, it is at a complete loss when it tries to explain consciousness. There is nothing in any of the sciences that predicts that any living creature should ever have a conscious experience. According to current science, it should all just go on automatically in the dark. We should be performing like biological robots. There's nothing that says we should actually have an inner experience, that we should be creating this experience of reality.

We understand how the eyes work and how they send messages to the brain and the brain decodes that and creates a picture of the world, but how that picture actually arises in consciousness is a complete mystery. That's the anomaly of the current scientific worldview. That's why I go back to what Thomas Kuhn [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] talked about in terms of paradigm shift.

We have a paradigm, which is a particular worldview in a science, or how we see things. I think we are in what I call a metaparadigm, which is a paradigm that underlies all the different paradigms in physics, psychology, mathematics, biology, anything. This deeper paradigm, the paradigm behind the paradigm, says the material world of space, time and matter is real. What Thomas Kuhn showed was that the paradigm is accepted as reality until something comes up that cannot be explained.

The classic case of that was the movement of the planets in the old idea of the Earth as the center of the universe. It couldn't explain the movement of the planets. Copernicus came along suggesting a new model, which was initially rejected and ridiculed but gradually accepted over time.

I think the anomaly in the present day that is a big problem for the current scientific worldview is the very existence of consciousness. As I say, there is nothing to predict it and there is no way of explaining it.

There's been a lot of attempts in the last 50 years to explain how consciousness arises out of the brain, but I think that's the wrong approach. That's a bit like the old astronomers who kept producing all of these complex models to explain how the planets went around the Earth in these strange patterns. And it required a complete break from that way of thinking to explain what was happening.

I think we are being pushed towards a complete reconsideration of the scientific worldview. That's not to say there's anything wrong at all about what physics or chemistry or molecular biology has discovered. I think all of that is valid. But what it doesn't do is touch upon consciousness. I think we need a new model that says, yes, the world of space, time and matter exists and we've learned a lot about that, but that's not all there is. And consciousness exists in the world beyond space, time and matter. I think that's the new worldview being called for.

It's not actually so new. Many metaphysicians have said this time and again that consciousness is absolutely fundamental to the universe. It's not something that comes out of matter but is something that is pre-existing. Again, that's a nice analogy with Copernicus, because he didn't actually think up his theory from scratch. He went back to the Greek philosophers who thought this but weren't taken very seriously.

What interests me is, when you make this shift and say, let's assume that consciousness is absolutely fundamental to the universe -- it isn't something that comes out of the brain but something that exists independently -- it doesn't change anything at all in modern science. It is no threat to the sciences. I sometimes think that if I had an institution, I'd have a big banner outside saying, "This new worldview is no threat to modern science." It doesn't challenge anything there at all. But what it does do is start opening up a whole new understanding of spirituality and what all the great mystics, saints and yogis have been saying for thousands of years. But because we've been caught in this materialistic worldview, we haven't been able to understand them. Most of the time we just think they're speaking a load of rubbish and mumbo jumbo. This is what happens when you do too much meditation: you come up with all these weird ideas that consciousness is primary.

When you make consciousness primary, you begin to understand what they're talking about. One example is the idea that everything we know is an arising of consciousness. That's what a lot of the great teachers are talking about when they say everything is within me or the universe is a part of me. I think they are experiencing firsthand, just by going into a very quiet meditation, they're experiencing the arising of the phenomenon in the mind and see how that happens. They're no longer caught in the illusion that what they're experiencing is physical reality. They're beginning to see, firsthand, that what they're experiencing is the arising of form in the mind.

That, to me, is what makes this new model, what I call the new metaparadigm, interesting and valuable. It starts to explain things that are otherwise inexplicable. What Thomas Kuhn explains is that a new model takes hold when it is able to account for things that previously were a mystery.

And yet, some scientists would remain confounded and resistant to the idea because they cannot explain this through their own model.

Russell: Yes, some would. That's what I was saying about belief. I think beliefs are our greatest attachments. The great physicist Neils Bohr pointed out that scientists don't change their minds very often. What happens is, the old scientists die out with their old worldview. The new worldview gets accepted because a new generation grows up with this new worldview, and that's how it gets established.

Does that account for how paradigm shifts usually occur?

Russell: Yes, generally. It's not an absolute truth, because you see people changing their minds, but a lot of time a paradigm shift is generational. People are brought up with the old model and they're so fixed with that worldview and it becomes hard to accept a new one. With Copernicus, it actually took 150 years for the culture to accept that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the Earth. It was only when Newton had done all the mathematics that people began to see how it really worked.

I think this is happening in our culture. I see a lot of the younger generation, the teenagers and the people in their 20s, who have a different worldview than people my age, and I'm in my 50s. I see the younger generation growing up with a different awareness of the world, particularly around human values and feelings and social responsibility. That's how the change happens. In 25 years, they will be significant people in the world, leaders in their professions, and they will carry that worldview with them. That will be the new establishment.

When we shift to this new metaparadigm, what will the world look like and how will it operate?

Russell: In some ways it will look the same. I think the shift is in the appreciation of the world, particularly our appreciation of other people. I think we're going to see changes in our relationships with each other. It's not so much that the physical world will operate differently, but it's how we operate within the world that will be different.

If we see that consciousness is fundamental, then we start to realize that it's in all living beings. With that comes a greater respect for all life. In the current worldview, you often hear scientists say that humans are conscious and other animals are not. They call them dumb animals just because they don't speak. I think all creatures are conscious. It's a part of being alive.

In acknowledging the fact that we each create our own experience of reality, we can begin to sympathize and understand people who are maybe creating their experience of reality in a different way from ours. It's not that they are wrong, but they are just looking at things differently. So from that comes a greater tolerance. I also think a greater compassion. One of the things that comes out of this model, for me, is the fact that what every single person is looking for is to feel better, to have a better state of mind. We call it happiness, joy, inner peace, whatever you want to call it. We're looking to avoid pain, avoid suffering, and to feel better. Where we are different is how we go about doing that.

The Dalai Lama said it perfectly when he said, "In the final analysis, the hope of every individual is simply peace of mind." When you realize there's a common unity to us all, that we're all looking for exactly the same thing, then a part of living our lives has to take into account not only how I can feel more peaceful, more content with myself, more happy, but how can I do that so the people I am interacting with also feel that way. Our goal in life becomes our collective well-being.

In the moment, we're in what is called a self-driven society. We're looking for our own inner satisfaction, but we do so in a way that often takes away other people's ability to be happy or find inner satisfaction. A lot of our self-centeredness excludes other people, and in a less-desirable form, it actually abuses other people or causes suffering to other people. So the major shift there is that we'd be moving into a world where our intention would be to create greater well-being for all those concerned. Again, that's what all the great religions have spoken of, whether it's loving your neighbor or not causing harm to other beings or looking for the enlightenment in all sentient beings. That's what comes out of many spiritual traditions. But instead of it being a rule that you have to live by, I think that when we start making this shift, it starts becoming a natural response we have toward the world. It's not something that's laid down on us by society or our religion, but it's something that spontaneously arises within us.

It may be hard for some to consider that such a shift is taking place. What are some signs that it's beginning to happen?

Russell: The shift itself is happening gently and throughout our culture, within millions and millions of people. First of all, we see a growing number of people all over the world who are becoming interested in inner development or personal development, whether they see it as spiritual or not spiritual at all. Perhaps it's just self-understanding or how they look after themselves with alternative health or diet or relaxation. People are seeing the value of therapy, even though they may not be mentally sick, but they see many things they can do to help free their minds from out-dated ways of thinking.

This whole movement called the Cultural Creatives [www.culturalcreatives.net] described by Paul Ray indicates that a growing percentage of people are looking at themselves in this way. This has come about in these times because we've realized that having even more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier. Certainly we need good food, clean drinking water, housing, jobs, clothing, heating and the basic comforts of life. Most of us in the Western world have those things. Our society keeps telling us, "If you had more, you'd be happier." We're realizing that it doesn't actually make us happier at all. That's why people are beginning to turn within, because they're recognizing that the next step is to free the individual. Freeing our hearts and freeing our minds. That trend is growing -- and growing very rapidly.

The shift itself comes in individuals through a process of inner awakening, and inner awakening comes through understanding ourselves or through meditation or through relaxation. It's getting out of the busyness of ourselves and getting in touch with who we are, and it comes from learning from each other. That may be through reading books or articles, the internet, radio, tapes, whatever. We are all learning from each other about a different way of being, of seeing the world, a different way of understanding each other. There are millions of us collectively learning.

One thing that is a good indication of what's happening is, just look at the numbers of books that are being published in this area. When I first got interested in this back in the '60s, I was living in Cambridge, home to one of the largest bookstores in England. There was just one shelf, off in the corner near the religious section, that had books on alternative spiritual development. Perhaps there were 30 or 40 books in the whole bookstore. But now you go into any medium-sized town and you have whole bookstores devoted to spirituality and inner development.

That is both a reflection of the interest that's there, but also and more significantly, the hundreds of thousands of books on the subject come from people who, each and in their own way, have been making their own inner explorations like I have. They have found something valuable, put it in a book and are sharing it and communicating it with others. I read their book, it influences me, and it helps me understand myself better, and I share that with others in my next book, and they may share that book with their community or with their family. So in this way, we're all learning from each other.

Look at the New York Times best-seller list and usually 30 to 50 percent of the books are on personal development. I think that's an absolute indication of how people are looking in this direction. The more we look and learn from each other, I think the faster the awakening process happens.

Another indication, as I say, are the younger people today. They have a lot more wisdom than I think my generation did at that age. I think sometimes if you could take some of the kids today and put them in a time machine, take them back to the '60s, the people of the '60s wouldn't know what to make of them, not to mention their skin piercings and tattoos. Apart from the external things, listen to the way they see the world and the way they understand things and what their values were, they'd stand out as some sort of a guru or teacher to anyone in the '60s. That is something we overlook very often, but that's a sign of the deeper shift that's happening.

By no means are we there yet. What I'm trying to do in the book is point out the direction in which we're going. What I'm pointing out are early indicators of that. To actually make that metaparadigm shift in ourselves is a big awakening. It's often talked about as enlightenment or spiritual wisdom. We are moving towards that. I wouldn't call myself enlightened at all, because I still have a lot of work to do in myself, things that have to be freed up, but I think we're moving in that direction. That's the important thing. That's what we need to encourage. So many of the problems we have in the world -- personal problems, social problems, political problems, environmental problems -- when you analyze them, time and time again they come back to human consciousness, human self-centeredness, short-sighted thinking, believing that if only we had enough then we'd be happy, greed or love of money. So many problems come back to the fact that we're stuck in that old, materialistic way of thinking. I feel we'll only going to be able to treat the world wisely and steer our way through these crises we're in if we begin to value the inner being and value the inner mind -- and seek to free it from its old habitual ways of thinking and its old assumptions.

Ultimately this has to become valued by the whole of our culture, as being a really important thing. At the moment, we rarely value the internet for what it's doing, in terms of communication or commerce or distribution of ideas. We need to move into the time where we really value the liberation of the inner human being as a very important thing society has to do in order to move forward.

Perhaps this transformation toward the valuing of the inner human being will contribute to the transformation of the scientific paradigm.

Russell: Yes, I think it does do that. When we get stuck in a certain paradigm, it gets hard to let go of that. I also know many scientists, particularly those who go deeply into quantum physics or cosmology, who start coming across questions themselves that are really spiritual questions about meaning, about purpose. That inclines them to begin to explore these things.

The theme "From Science to God," which is the title of the book, is really two things for me. It's partly my own journey of how I started off as a scientist with no interest whatsoever in spiritual things. It was my whole interest in consciousness and discovering what it is from a scientific point of view -- and realizing science wasn't going to answer that. That led me to move more toward the philosophical, especially the Eastern philosophy, and it started opening me up to an understanding of spirituality and a whole new understanding of what God was about in terms of consciousness.

When we begin to understand consciousness fully, that will be a bridge between science and spirituality and the two will no longer seem to be in conflict. They can both sit under the same roof quite happily. They don't at the moment, because the scientific worldview excludes the spiritual worldview, and the spiritual worldview often thinks that science is just closed-minded or has it wrong.

You have a much different definition of God now than when you were younger. Will you describe what that is?

Russell: When I was younger, my concept of God was what was fed into me by society and the Church -- the traditional image of some male figure sitting somewhere up in the sky looking over us and judging us and deciding what's right and wrong and creating things. That is what I rejected in my teenage years, because it didn't fit with my understanding of the world.

Now I would define God as the very essence of consciousness, which is the very essence of each and every one of us. It's that feeling of beingness that we all carry around inside us and don't notice most of the time, because we're focused on the outer world. It's that essence of the self. By self, I don't mean me, Peter Russell, person, but that inner sense of beingness that we often refer to as I. If you look at many of the mystics, you find time and time again in virtually every culture of the world people who come up with statements like, "I am God." Now, on the old model of God, that statement is preposterous. How can any individual be the Supreme Being who runs the universe? That clearly is arrogant and a sign of a deranged mind.

But if you look at it as the mystics are discovering, that God is that essence of consciousness within each and every one of us, that God is present in the center of our hearts but we miss it, then God is not a form somewhere out there in the center of the universe but is our own innermost essence. Then, for me, what I find most fascinating is that all of religion begins to make more sense in a whole new way. For example, when I consider prayer, instead of thinking of it as some petition to somebody out there who I hope is going to hear me and change the world so things go right for me down here, it shifts to me making a petition to my innermost self, to my deepest level of being, for help, for support, for seeing things in a different way. I am appealing to that wisdom that lies deep within myself. And I know that is heard, because I'm appealing to myself. It's also something I have power over. It's not like I live in hope.

The divine is within each and every one of us. I love the Indian greeting of namast: I bow to the God in you. We often say hello, and that actually comes from something very similar, referring to the hallowedness, the holiness, of each of us, going back to the Old English. To say, "Hello," acknowledges the holiness of the other, but we have lost sight of the meaning. So God is within each of us, hiding there, waiting to be noticed.

So actually, in realizing all of this, we realize how unchanging all of this is, from the ancient mystics to the 21st century.

Russell: I think there's a universal wisdom and understanding that people touch upon in their own way. When you start exploring these inner matters, you come across this basic knowledge. And I think that knowledge has been rediscovered hundreds of thousands of times. It's been written about and talked about. Sometimes those people who have talked about it have become great spiritual teachers. And each time they have expressed it in the language and examples of their own culture, so maybe on the surface it appears in different forms. But when you get down and look at the root of it, all the great traditions and mystics and saints have all pointed to the same, basic understanding of human consciousness. So I think it is a universal truth. And then it gets lost, because we get caught up in what we're doing and what we think we need in the world and focus on the material side of life again. So we have people constantly rediscovering that wisdom.

I think that's what's happening today. But rather than one person rediscovering it for themselves, we are collectively doing that. And that's what is making these times so fascinating. Together, we are honing in on that underlying spiritual wisdom and bringing it up to the surface again.

We're sharing that with each other and realizing that we have that in common.

Russell: And gradually, we're getting closer and closer to the truth. I don't think any of us is the great enlightened being who has discovered it all. Through the sharing, we are enlightening each other, step by step.

For more information on Peter Russell's visit to St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, Minneapolis, call (612) 823-8205. For more on Peter Russell, go to his website at www.peterussell.com

Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com

Copyright 2002 Tim Miejan