Dalai Lama Renaissance
A film by Khashyar Darvich
(Wakan Foundation for the Arts, 2008, DVD@DalaiLamaFilm.com)

For five days in 1999, His Holiness the Dalai Lama hosted a group of “new paradigm” thinkers at his home in Dharamsala, India, for a series of discussions called the Synthesis Dialogues. The guest list was somewhat of a who’s who of the spiritual-but-not-religious, science-meets-spirit, and New Thought movements in the United States, plus a smattering of cultural creatives from around the world. Their sacred, and certainly ambitious, mission was to create a synthesis of the participants’ wide-ranging and diverse knowledge that could help lay the foundation for a whole new form of secular spirituality. The Dalai Lama passionately wants such a global spirituality to emerge in the world—a shared set of higher values independent of any particular religious faith, and even of faith in general. So when the late Christian-Hindu monk Brother Wayne Teasdale and a lawyer-mediator named Brian Muldoon suggested to him that they convene a group of high-level spiritual thinkers and activists to come up with a plan that would enable a new secular spiritual renaissance to flower worldwide, he was thrilled and agreed to host the event.

Unfortunately for him, however, he had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Dalai Lama Renaissance, a film by award-winning producer-director Khashyar Darvich, documents in hilarious, excruciating, and frequently embarrassing detail the events of those five days in the Himalayas where, perhaps for the first time, a talented and independently minded group of individuals met together to try to plan how to shift the consciousness of the world. It wasn’t exactly a “renaissance” in any conventional sense of the word, but the film has a certain persuasive power all the same, albeit in the form of irony. If you’ve ever had any doubt that the secular postmodern West is in dire need of exactly the sort of spiritual backbone and shared higher context that the Dalai Lama is so keenly interested in, then look no further. Just fire up this DVD and prepare to be amazed.

The narrative “stars” New Age physicists Amit Goswami and Fred Alan Wolf, YES! magazine founder Frances Korten, progressive economist Vicki Robin, and evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. Many of the invited luminaries—Reverend Michael Beckwith, human potential pioneer Jean Houston, and Thai monk-activist Sulak Sivaraksa, to name a few—play only bit parts. Several of the rest (including Voluntary Simplicity author Duane Elgin and conscious evolutionist Barbara Marx Hubbard) never speak on camera at all, making one wonder if they declined to be included in the documentary. Regardless, there’s plenty of material left for Darvich to work with, and early on in the film, as the dialogues are beginning, he pokes fun at the antics taking place between people who have committed their lives to creating a new world and yet, surprisingly, seem barely able to sit in the same room together.

One scene, for example, follows a group of the “synthesizers” as they sit discussing the question: What is the emerging paradigm or leading edge of thought and practice in your field? The camera repeatedly cuts between Goswami, Wolf, Sahtouris, and several others as their conversation devolves into a verbal tug of war between Goswami and Wolf, with Sahtouris occasionally patting Goswami on the shoulder and trying to soothe him into silence. While impish music plays signaling to the audience the absurdity of what is unfolding, Wolf turns to Goswami and says, “You’re going to dominate this thing.”

“Fred, you’re the one who is dominating!” Goswami replies.

“I’m not dominating,” Wolf counters. “I just want to hear what she has to say, and I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Yes, but Fred, you are not letting me speak at all!”

“That’s because you keep interrupting!”

“I’m not interrupting! She was finished!”

And so on.

As all of this is unfolding on screen, Darvich also intersperses bits of interviews with Goswami and Wolf, who earnestly explain that their total derailment of that particular discussion was really just an expression of love and compassion. The scene then jumps to another vignette from later that day in which facilitator Brian Muldoon comments to the assembled group, “Some of you noticed we all have egos, and sometimes they behave well and sometimes they don’t. Tomorrow, we would really love it if they behaved well, okay?”

Things pretty much go downhill from there, spiraling rapidly into a multihued portrait of narcissism, discord, and ambition that seems to flabbergast the group’s facilitators as much as it defies their every effort to rein it in. One New Thought minister recounts his recent “Dalai Lama nightmare,” in which His Holiness, who is known for the rare quality of his attention and for making everyone he meets feel like a close personal friend, snubs him. Facilitator Nancy Margulies shares her “secret fantasy” that when she finally meets him, the Dalai Lama will say “‘Who is that?’ and I’ll be singled out somehow.” Economist Vicki Robin remarks, “On the one hand, I do believe that he’s the fourteenth reincarnation of some divine being. But the other part of it is that he’s become something for the rest of us. . . . Here’s this man who if he just says ‘Boo!’ about something, the whole world will hear it. So we’re all offering him our absolute best fruit [ideas], hoping that he’ll bring our fruit, our fruit, to the world.”

At one point, a group of about sixty or so family, friends, and colleagues of the synthesizers—who came along for the journey to India, but were never formally part of the dialogues—are invited to attend the group’s working sessions, not as participants, but as witnesses to “hold the space.” Soon, however, some of them begin to rebel, complaining that they are being unfairly excluded. One vocal member of this witness group is Thomas A. Forsthoefel, an assistant professor of religion at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, who objects to the “hierarchical structure” established by the organizers: “[We are] witnesses who are mute here! I’m sorry, but we all come from certain experiences, spiritualities, trainings, and we have something to say.”

Forsthoefel’s declaration of victimhood lands like a perfect sucker punch to the soft, sensitive underbelly of politically correct postmodern spirituality: compassion. Perhaps the word “compassion” means something else entirely in a traditional Buddhist context, but as the ubiquitous buzzword here, it means including everyone without discriminating; making sure that no one feels bad; and attending to every cry of victimization, even when it thinly masks self-serving motivations. It’s the kind of compassion that makes it impossible to deal directly with the egotism and fractiousness that stand in the way of unity and cohesiveness among this group of spiritual leaders with an almost toxic aversion to hierarchy and leadership. So when Goswami hijacks the synthesis process once again by refusing to let anyone else speak for him at their final audience with the Dalai Lama, demanding the chance to personally present his own work and ideas to His Holiness, it’s not exactly a surprise that the facilitators give in. At this point, they hardly seem to have much choice in the matter.

“When [Brother Wayne and I] visited with His Holiness last month,” Muldoon says to the Dalai Lama and the assembled crowd on the day of their final, culminating meeting, “we said that surely by Wednesday afternoon we’ll have solved many of the world’s problems. And we’ll be ready to move on, because we’ll have jelled as a group, we’ll have our strategy together, and we’ll be able to move ahead. Well, we’re not quite there. Because frankly, the facilitators have been fired in the process.” His Holiness, clearly mystified, can only turn to his Tibetan attendants and ask them to translate. And the following look of confusion and disappointment that comes over his face is really the most painful indictment of all.

Indeed, it’s one thing for this diverse group of highly accomplished scientists, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and social activists to struggle to find a strong, stable, creative common ground on which to work together, which is by no means an easy thing to do. But it’s another for them to so consistently sidestep, misinterpret, or simply ignore their most basic reason for being there and the deeper message His Holiness is constantly trying to get across to them. It’s almost as though the difficulties he sometimes has in understanding them are mirrored by the startling incapacity of the group as a whole to appreciate his real reason for bringing them together, or his real hope for the outcome. For whatever any of the participants may have done, on or off camera, to get things back on track—and many of them certainly tried—the centrifugal force of the collective seems almost destined to pull them apart again. His Holiness always seems to be reaching to convey that the world is desperately in need of an actual spiritual renaissance, an effective post-religious context for shared purpose, meaning, and morality in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex global society. His boundless passion on the subject is a beautiful and dignifying thing to watch. “This is not in my interest,” he says. “It is in the interest for everyone. We have not come here for making money, or for making fame, or for making a nice statement. No!” But if the participants ever did discuss these deeper questions in their sessions together, Darvich doesn’t show it in the film.

In the end, the closest they come to a concerted response to His Holiness is a proposal by one of the members to help save Tibet by organizing international economic sanctions against China. (At one point, environmental activist Vandana Shiva also asks him to become the leader of the free world, which he politely declines.) His Holiness patiently explains that this is not the problem he wants them to solve, and that the issues are far more complicated than they realize. But by that point, their time is almost up, and the dialogues are concluding. According to the filmmakers, who chose the title Dalai Lama Renaissance after all, the final emotional catharsis of the Synthesis Dialogues seems to be the ensuing recognition among the majority of the participants that their real task is not to save Tibet at all, but to embrace, confront, and heal their own “inner Tibets”—whatever personal challenges they each might have that stand in the way of their own development. For Darvich (and most reviewers of the film, I might add), this shift of attention from larger collective questions to smaller personal ones seems to hold water as a profound discovery, a weighty crescendo, and a truly happy ending for a group of forty of the world’s best and brightest spiritual minds who gathered to help take humanity forward a step or two. But frankly, it’s hard to imagine what planet they could possibly be living on, in this solar system or any other, in which that particular reading of things could ever be taken seriously.

Dalai Lama Renaissance? Here on Earth we’ll call it The Real World: Dharamsala.

–Ross Robertson

 

Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio
(Simon & Schuster, 2009, hardcover $26.00)

I grew up across the street from my art teacher, a devout Christian woman with a deep love for drawing and painting. She’d often let me continue working after class. For a long time, I’d sit alone in her studio’s late afternoon light, aware of nothing but the image emerging before me. Recently, while reading Mario Livio’s new book, Is God a Mathematician?, I discovered a connection between art and another passion of my school days—math. Both disciplines are inspired by a desire to create something that reflects the world we observe, that clarifies it and reveals a level of beauty and order otherwise unseen. After a few semesters of college calculus, however, I left behind my interest in the subject and eventually took up the common notion of math as rather dull, robotic calculations. Mario Livio’s book on the history and phenomenon of mathematics lured me back, and then some. 

Livio has an impressive background, having spent several decades conducting research on the origin and mechanics of the universe as the senior astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He has also published three other popular books on mathematics and more than four hundred scientific papers. But, Is God a Mathematician? is his first book that focuses on the individuals responsible for developing mathematics and the fascination that drove them. Writing about thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Livio gives an in-depth chronological account of the mathematicians who have contributed so much to what we know about the universe. He dives deeply into their individual lives and work as well as the influences they had on one another. At the same time, he shows how mathematics can reveal fascinating details and new discoveries about the world around us. But the most intriguing aspect of Livio’s book is his depiction of the human passion behind mathematical discovery. The best mathematicians were enthralled with life’s beauty to such a degree that they were able to tap into an extraordinary capacity to understand and articulate it.

I was most struck by the power of their passion as expressed in what Livio calls the “anticipatory” side of mathematical achievements. This anticipatory pattern can be seen only by looking back at the development of math over a long period of time. Livio writes, “Many mathematical truths miraculously anticipated questions about the cosmos and human life not even posed until many centuries later.” He gives several examples of this phenomenon, but the one I found most remarkable began with the development of Euclidean knot theory. It started in the 1700s with French mathematician Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde, who was the first to recognize that “knots” could be studied by calculating the position of interconnected loops embedded in three-dimensional or Euclidean space. By the nineteenth century, a few mathematicians had picked up the theory as a possible means to explain the structure of the atom. Influenced by the ideas of English physicist William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin), they were convinced that “atoms were really knotted tubes of ether, that mysterious substance that was supposed to permeate all space.” It wasn’t long, though, before an alternative view prevailed, leaving knot theory at a seeming dead end—and here is where the story takes an unexpected “twist.” Even though it no longer had a known purpose, work on the theory continued. In fact, knot enthusiasts would spend the next several hundred years trying to understand the many variations of knots simply because they were curious. As mathematician Michael Atiyah puts it, “The study of knots became an esoteric branch of pure mathematics.” “To these individuals,” Livio says, “the idea of understanding knots and the principles that govern them was exquisitely beautiful.”

The grand finale came centuries later, however, when these abstract endeavors in knot theory were found to be fundamental in understanding a wide range of modern pursuits—including the double-helical structure of DNA. Knot theory became so useful in modern physics that it led to the infamous string theory, which may finally explain the physical law that governs everything from the largest to the smallest dimensions of the universe. And all of this came from an obscure branch of math developed by men who believed their work had no application in physical reality. There was little of the mental toil and grasping for answers I’d imagined would be behind such startling mathematical insights.

Ultimately, Is God a Mathematician? shows that it was human fascination with the absolute truth and beauty characteristic of math that eventually led to revelation. This makes clear why so many of the great mathematicians in Livio’s book were also instrumental in developing philosophical and moral ideals. In the end, Livio succeeds in showing how math illuminates the fundamental workings of the universe and thus something significant about the nature of God. But it is the way he reveals the internal creative experience and how it drove the best mathematicians that makes his book so extraordinary.

–Megan Cater

 

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
by David Eagleman
(Pantheon Books, 2009, hardcover $20.00)

I’ve never read anything quite like David Eagleman’s Sum. Forty fictional vignettes, each no more than two to four pages long, revolve around a central question: What happens to us after we die? It isn’t exactly a collection of short stories, and I can’t quite call it a novel either. One reviewer suggested calling it “philosofiction” or “a brainy parlor game in print.” But however we might classify it, this is undoubtedly an original, compelling, and strangely uplifting little book.

Each of Eagleman’s imaginative and beautifully written tales presents a unique vision of the afterlife, ranging from the cleverly sci-fi to the mesmerizingly sublime. Though some scenarios are based on traditional religious concepts, most are clearly the ingenious products of Eagleman’s own mind. In a chapter called “Seed,” one arrives in heaven to meet an accidental God, a trial-and-error Creator who is just as baffled and awestruck by the inner workings and beauty of the universe as we are. In a piece titled “Great Expectations,” materialistic human beings attempt to upload their consciousness into exciting computerized fantasy worlds immediately prior to death, only to have the souls they didn’t believe in rudely whisked away to a dull heaven of gentle harps and puffy white clouds. In “Circle of Friends,” we enter an afterlife populated only by the people we met while alive—an ultimately lonely existence for most souls, reflecting back to us the stark degree to which we lived our lives self-absorbed. And in yet another tale, we expand enormously after death back into our true nine-dimensional forms, resuming our roles as cosmic construction workers upholding the movements of galaxies.

Throughout Sum, I couldn’t help wondering where the author actually stands on matters of spirit. At times he seems like a sensitive atheist; at others he comes across as an interfaith humanist. A visit to his website reveals that he disavows all ordinary labels, considering himself a “possibilian” instead. The important thing for a possibilian, he explains, is “to explore and celebrate the vast possibilities” of existence, holding multiple hypotheses in mind simultaneously, especially with regard to topics where no definitive answers seem near at hand. If that sounds a lot like the open-minded stance of a good scientist, well, it is. Eagleman is a professional neuroscientist, who spends his days studying the ways the brain perceives the world and cognizes the passing of time.

As scientists go, Eagleman certainly defies the stereotype of the cold, detached analyst, viewing human beings through a telescope from afar. Sum’stales are at turns hilarious, satirical, poignant, existential, and spiritual, and one catches frequent glimpses of the author’s deep humanity and love of life pulsing behind the scenes. While Sum’s scenarios seem to present mutually exclusive conceptions of the hereafter, they do add up to a kind of multidimensional perspective on the human condition that is difficult to pin down. And that, to me, seems to be the book’s “possibilian” goal—offering a broadly nuanced suggestion of what it means to be human, here and now, by envisioning the full sum of what our lives may ultimately amount to when all is said and done.

–Tom Huston

 

Books for Evolutionaries
with Peter Russell

Peter Russell is a futurist, scholar, and prolific author whose books include The Global Brain (1995), The Conscious Revolution (1999), and From Science to God (2002).

 

Q: What are the three best books you’ve read about the nature of consciousness?

The Radiance of Being
by Allan Combs

This is a serious book for the general reader, filled with a mix of hard science and deep philosophy. Allan Combs is not biased toward a particular point of view, and he reviews a broad spectrum of the various approaches to consciousness, from chaos theory to spiritual insights. He provides an excellent introduction to the subject and to other thinkers in the field.

 

Consciousness from Zombies to Angels
by Christian de Quincey

Lucid and comprehensive, this book tackles some of the fundamental questions about consciousness head-on: What is consciousness? Could it ever emerge from insentient matter? Are all beings conscious? What is the Self? Writing for the layperson, Christian de Quincey makes you think about consciousness in a new way.

 

Toward a Psychology of Awakening
by John Welwood

John Welwood integrates the spiritual realizations of the East with the psychological insights of the West, reconciling the development of individual consciousness with the spiritual search for transcendence. A solid book on the awakening of consciousness, it weaves theory and practice in a grounded and accessible style.

 

Q: What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

The Head Trip
by Jeff Warren

Using an original approach, Jeff Warren distinguishes twelve different states of consciousness, from lucid dreaming to the transcendental. It stands out because the author bases his ideas not only on the views of neuroscientists, anthropologists, and meditation practitioners but also on his own personal explorations. Particularly fascinating are his discoveries about the murky realm of sleep. Sprinkled with comic panels, this book is as entertaining as it is insightful.

 

 

Speaking of Books
with Duane Elgin, author of The Living Universe

Interview by Joel Pitney and Megan Cater

Duane Elgin is no stranger to the conscious evolution movement. His 1981 classic, Voluntary Simplicity, inspired a generation of people to approach their lives and choices with the entire planet in mind. Since that time, Elgin, whose biography includes working with Stanford University’s famous CIA-sponsored “psychic spying” program, writing multiple popular books, and founding several nonprofits dedicated to media activism, has been a tireless advocate for helping humanity awaken to a larger perspective on who we are and why we are here. In his new book, The Living Universe (2009), Elgin broadens the scope of his vision from a planetary scale to include the entire universe. In it he proposes a new spiritually based and scientifically informed cosmology that sees the universe not as a mechanical conglomeration of lifeless particles but as a dynamic, living system.

EnlightenNext: In the book, you talk about how our scientific understanding is telling us that the universe is a living entity. Can you explain how science is leading us to that conclusion?

Duane Elgin: We’ve discovered that one of the key characteristics of any living system is continuous regeneration. Consider your body, for example. The inner lining of your intestine is renewed roughly every five days, the outer layer of your skin is replaced every two weeks, and your bones are replaced every seven to ten years. This isn’t just true for our bodies. We’ve discovered that the entire universe is being continuously regenerated at every level, from atoms to humans to galaxies.

One way to understand this is to look at the geometry or the architecture that the universe is creating over and over again at every scale. What we see is a form called a torus—a kind of donut shape—which is the universal form of self-organizing, self-referencing systems. We can see this in nature, for example, in the air currents generated by a tornado or in the magnetic field surrounding the earth. It’s a system that is simply holding itself together with its own forces. Like an eddy in a stream or a vortex in a whirlpool, all that exists is energy flowing through and sustaining these persisting patterns. So the universe is creating these self-organizing systems throughout itself. It’s a garden for growing life in a context of enormous freedom.

EN: Why do you feel it’s important for people to develop this understanding of the universe as living?

DE: Until recently, the dominant cosmology in contemporary physics held that since the big bang nearly fourteen billion years ago, little more has happened than a rearranging of the cosmic furniture. This dead-universe theory assumes creation occurred only once, when a massive explosion spewed out lifeless material debris into equally lifeless space. Life then somehow mysteriously emerged as nonliving atoms inexplicably organized and grew themselves into ever more complex forms. In this scenario, who we are and life itself are meaningless. We’re just a speck of aliveness in a vast ocean of deadness, and when we die, we just sink into oblivion.

But now science is starting to say, “Wait a minute. We’re living in a continuously regenerating system, and there are extraordinary amounts of life just pouring through all of it.” From this perspective, we see that the whole of existence is alive, and when we die, we die into this vast ocean of aliveness. We’re beginning to recognize how extraordinary we are as a species and that what really matters is the extent to which we recognize ourselves as that intensification of aliveness. Do we exist in a reality that has no meaning, or do we see ourselves in this much larger context? It matters enormously whether we’re just playing biochemical games or we’re authentically connecting with the deeper aliveness that permeates the universe.