Excerpt . . .

"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand."

—Bertrand Russell (1918), A Free Man’s Worship.

It expresses the terrible poetry of a meaningless universe, rolling along entropic channels of chance, blind and without purpose, sometimes accidentally throwing up the magnificence and beauty of natural and human creations, but inevitably destined to pull all our glories asunder and leave no trace, no indication that we ever lived, that our lonely planet once bristled and buzzed with colorful life and reached out to the stars. It is all for nothing.

Such is the plot and substance of modern science boiled down to its bare essentials, a legacy from the founders of the modern worldview—Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Laplace, and Darwin.

Somewhere in our nested system of beliefs that story lurks, ready to rob our visions and our dreams, our loves and our passions of any meaning, of any validity beyond the scripted directions of a blind, unconscious, purposeless plot maker. If something in our experience stirs and reacts to this with disbelief, even with a question, it is surely worth paying attention to because the possibility that that story is wrong or incomplete has far-reaching consequences.

What if that sweeping physicalist vision leaves something out? What if there is something other than an "accidental collocation of atoms" at work in the universe? What if, for instance, the experience or consciousness that contemplated the world and discovered the atoms was itself real?1 What if the ability of "collocated atoms" to purposefully turn around and direct their gaze to reflect on themselves was more than "accidental"? What if consciousness participates in the way the world works? What if consciousness can dance with the atoms and give them form and direction? What if the atoms themselves choreograph their own dance? What then?

In this book, I will explore an alternative story—one where the atoms do choreograph their own dance—a worldview that tells us consciousness matters and that matter is conscious.

Deserts of Meaning

These deserts are not only environmental, such as the destruction of the planet’s dwindling rainforests and marshlands; there are also existential deserts—deserts of the spirit, of the soul, and of the mind. Deserts of meaning. It is precisely this aspect of the global crisis that calls out for a rigorous and inspired philosophy of mind. We begin the twenty-first century living in a technological society based on science, and we live with a science based on a materialistic paradigm. We live, in other words, in a world lacking any grounding in meaning, in values, in purposes or goals. With few exceptions, the goals and "purposes" that do exist within our social institutions have no metaphysical foundation. They emerge, for the most part, as expressions of an economic philosophy based on a materialistic metaphysics that denies any foundation to goals, purposes, and values—other than biologically-driven preferences or the relativity of social power plays. Our religious and artistic traditions have attempted to fill the gap, but increasingly succumb to a social preference for scientific knowledge as the final authority on how we should govern our lives.

But it is precisely the wisdom of meaning, of value, of experience, that our societies need to balance the knowledge of physical science, and the obsessive push for technological progress. In short, we critically need a science of mind to match our science of matter. . . .

What is needed now, perhaps more than ever, is to find a way to restore a sense of the sacred to science and to the world—to embody mind and to "enmind" matter. . . .

In this book I will look at the mystery of consciousness, at why mind should appear so alien in our scientific view of the world. . . .

Traditionally, questions central to philosophy of mind have been approached with the assumption that the rational, cognitive, categorizing human mind could untangle the mind-body knot. This book proposes a different approach: The paradoxes are confronted head on, not as a knot to be untied, but as an experiential phenomenon to be embraced as it presents itself—through a shift in the being of the explorer. . . .

We may untangle much of the accumulated confusion surrounding the paradoxes of mind, but when we touch the dynamic heart of natural paradox itself, we must let go of rationality and logic, and switch to a different mode of being with the phenomenon. At that point, the philosophy of paradox turns as much on feelings—on emotions, intuitions, and felt sense—as on the pivots of language and rational analysis. We must commit ourselves to peeling away the logical tangles, squeezing the most out of our rational, cognitive and verbal faculties. But in the end, when we come to that point where intellect can take us no further, we must bow in silence before the mystery—and participate with it on its own ineffable terms.

Back and forth, we must switch between intellect and intuition, between rational, objective knowledge and embodied paradox. Achieving such a synthesis involves a shift to "participatory epistemology"—a way of knowing that takes us into the heart of mystery, and invites the paradox of consciousness into our very being.