From Science to God
by Peter Russell

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On the Frontier where Science and Spirituality Meet

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I never imagined that spirituality would be so important in my life. Throughout my childhood and student years I always thought I would become a scientist. I loved discovering how the world worked. Why is the sky blue? What makes the wind blow? Why does iron rust? How do plants know when to bloom? How do planes fly? Why are snowflakes are six-pointed stars?

The more I discovered, the more fascinated I became. At sixteen I was devouring Einstein and marveling at the paradoxical world of quantum physics. I delved into different theories of how the universe began, and pondered the mysteries of space and time. I had a passion for knowing, an insatiable curiosity and a need to understand the laws and principles that governed the world.

I was not, however, a materialist, believing that everything could be explained by the physical sciences. I had a growing interest in the untapped potentials of the human mind. Stories of yogis buried alive for days or lying on beds of nails, intrigued me. I dabbled in so-called out-of-body experiences and experimented with the altered states of consciousness produced by hyperventilating or entraining the brain's alpha rhythms with pulsating lights. I also developed my own techniques of meditation, though I did not recognize them as such at the time.

Nevertheless, my overriding interest was still in the physical sciences, and, above all, mathematics. Thus, when the time came to select a subject to study at university, the choice was obvious. And so was the choice of university. Cambridge was the best British university for studying mathematics.

The Turning Point

In my third year at Cambridge, I was exactly where I thought I wanted to be, studying in the best of universities, surrounded by truly inspiring minds. I even had Stephen Hawking for a tutor. Yet something else was stirring deep inside me. My studies explained how the material universe evolved from the simplest of the elements — hydrogen. But the most fascinating question for me became: How had hydrogen — a single electron orbiting a single proton — evolved into a system that could be aware of itself? How had the universe become conscious?

It was becoming clear that however hard I studied, the physical sciences would not answer this more fundamental question. I found myself reading more about mind and consciousness, and less able to focus on my mathematical assignments. After much heart-searching, I decided to change course and study experimental psychology; it seemed the closest academic approach to understanding consciousness.

Experimental psychology taught me much about the basic functioning of the human brain. Yet, despite all I learnt about neurophysiology, biochemistry, memory, behavior, and perception, I found myself no closer to understanding the nature of consciousness itself. Indeed, I do not recall the word “consciousness” having ever been mentioned during the course of my studies.

The East, however, seemed to have a lot to say about consciousness, and so had many mystics, from around the world. For thousands of years they had focused on the realm of the mind, exploring its subtleties through direct personal experience. I realized that such approaches offered explanations of consciousness absent from Western science. So I began delving into ancient texts such as the Upanishads, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, The Cloud of Unknowing, and works of contemporary writers such as Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Christopher Isherwood.

A year later I went to India, where I lived for six months in the foothills of the Himalayas, studying meditation and Eastern philosophy. There I gained an entirely new perspective on spiritual awakening, and its value for the modern world. Upon my return to England, I established a meditation center in Cambridge, and began doctoral research on the psychology of meditation. I start to explore more deeply the relationship of brain and mind, and also the fascinating question of the nature of reality — and how we each create our own perception of reality. It soon became clear that what we call reality is a construction in the mind.

The Hard Problem

Today, after thirty years of investigation into the nature of consciousness, I have come to appreciate just how big a problem the subject is for contemporary science. We all know that we are conscious beings. It is the most intimate and obvious fact of our existence. Indeed, all we ever truly know are the thoughts, images, and feelings arising in our consciousness. Yet as far as Western science is concerned, there is nothing more difficult to explain. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner personal experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any awareness? Why do we have any inner life at all?

This paradox — namely, the undeniable existence of human consciousness set against the absence of any satisfactory scientific account for it — suggests to me that something is seriously amiss with the contemporary scientific worldview. For a long time I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Then, about four years ago, I suddenly realized where the error lay.

Rather than assuming that consciousness somehow arises from the material world, as most scientists do, we need to consider the alternative worldview put forward by many metaphysical and spiritual traditions in which consciousness is held to be a fundamental component of reality — as fundamental as space, time and matter, perhaps even more so. When we do, everything changes, and everything remains the same.

As far as contemporary science goes, nothing is lost. Mathematics remains the same, as do physics, biology, and chemistry. What changes is our understanding of ourselves. We can begin to understand what the great sages have been telling us for thousands of years about the nature of the mind.

The Divine Within

Those who have devoted themselves to a personal exploration of consciousness have repeatedly discovered a deep inner union with the divine. Some have expressed this blatantly in the statement "I am God." To many, this sounds blasphemous. God is not a human being, but the supreme deity, the almighty, eternal creator. How can any lowly human being claim that he or she is God? When the fourteenth-century Christian priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that "God and I are One," he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to "recant everything that he had falsely taught." Not all were so lucky. The tenth-century Islamic mystic al-Hallãj was crucified for using language that claimed an identity with God.

To those who do not believe in a God, such statements are not blasphemous so much as the symptoms of some delusion or pathology. In the modern scientific era, God seems a totally unnecessary concept. Science has looked into deep space, across the breadth of creation to the edges of the universe. It has looked back in "deep time" to the beginning of creation. And it has looked down into the "deep structure" of the cosmos, to the fundamental constituents of matter. In each case science finds no evidence for God; nor any need for God — the Universe seems to work perfectly well without any divine assistance. Thus anyone talking of a personal identity with God is clearly talking nonsense.

That is where I stood thirty years ago. Then I was a scientist with little interest in things spiritual. I saw little reason to believe in a supreme being who ruled over the workings of the universe. Now I recognize that I was rejecting a rather naïve and old-fashioned interpretation of God. When we look to mystical writings, we find few claims for God being found in the realm of space, time, and matter. When mystics refer to God, they are usually pointing toward the realm of personal experience, not something in the physical realm. If we want to find God, we have to look within, into the realm of deep mind — a realm that science has yet to explore.

Converging Worldviews

The worldviews of science and spirit have not always been as far apart as they are today. Five hundred years ago, what science there was existed within the established worldview of the Christian church. Following Copernicus, Descartes and Newton, Western science broke away from the doctrines of monotheistic religion, establishing its own atheistic worldview, which today is very different from that of traditional religion. But the two can, and I believe eventually will, be reunited. And their meeting point is consciousness. When science views consciousness as fundamental to reality, and when religion understands God as the light of consciousness shining within us all, the two worldviews start to find common ground.

This fusion of dichotomies is a common pattern in paradigm shifts. Newton brought terrestrial and celestial mechanics under the same laws. Maxwell integrated electricity, magnetism and light into a single set of equations. When we shift to a worldview in which consciousness is fundamental, the integration goes much further. The two halves of humanity’s search for truth are now brought under the same roof.

Today this meeting of science and spirit is critical, not just for a more comprehensive understanding of the cosmos, but also for the future of our species. We desperately need a worldview that validates spiritual inquiry, for it is the spiritual aridity of our current times that lies behind so many of our crises.

Peter Russell is the author of ten books. The above article is based on his latest book From Science to God: The Mystery of Consciousness and the Meaning of Light. For more information the book and Peter Russell’s work visit www.peterussell.com.

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