Good evening. Thank you all for coming to
the annual Dudleian lecture. It's a great pleasure
for me to at least be able to introduce the
introducer tonight to introduce the lecture itself. But first let me just say
a word about the Dudleian lectures, which may be of
at least historical interest for some of you because
in fact they are a rather special lectureship. As Perry Miller, the great
historian here at Harvard said in 1953 when he gave the
Dudleian lecture, a history of the Dudleian lectures
is in fact an epitome of the modern intellect at
least as that intellect impinged upon Harvard. It's Harvard's, of course,
oldest endowed lectureship established in 1750 by the
bequest of Paul Dudley, 1675 to 1751 and a graduate of
the Harvard class of 1690. And so a year before his
death he made this bequest. Dudley himself, we
don't have a lot of records of in
his Harvard time except that there is
a passage in a book of biographical
sketches of graduates of Harvard University
by Sibley which says that he
appears to have been a normal undergraduate with
no unusual finds and only one large bill for broken glass. So Mister Justice Dudley,
as he later became, served as attorney general and
Chief Justice of Massachusetts. So he went on to a distinguished
career, however much glass he broke in late carousing. Now in records relating
to the Dudleian lecturer at Harvard University,
President Josiah Quincy notes that Judge Dudley
founded the lecture by giving the very large sum
of 133 pounds, six shillings, and eight pence in like money. That has grown under the careful
management of the Harvard endowment somewhat
so that we are able to bring distinguished
figures such as our speaker tonight here and not be
embarrassed to do so. He also went on to
say that of course, the yearly income should be
devoted to this and namely to an anniversary sermon or
lecture to be held or preached at the said college
once every year successively by such persons
as the trustees of the legacy shall choose and appoint. That trusteeship now
having passed to the school here there is no longer a
separate board of trustees. Under the four rubrics which
Mr. Justice Dudley designated for the lectures, there is to be
a cycle over four years of four lectures. The first on natural
religion which is the category in which
our lecture tonight falls. As an Islamic
specialist myself it's very nice to know that
Islam is considered to be natural religion. That may mean that others
are unnatural, I'm not sure. But in any case it is
the rubric under which this year's lecture falls. The second on revealed religion. The third on the
Romish church, and I'll come back in just
a moment to that. And the fourth on Presbyterian
or congregational ordination, which is now known
as the validity of non-Episcopal ordination. And that one is perhaps
puzzling to some of you. But the long and short
of it is that you have to remember at the time
in which these lectures were in fact put together
for the first time, this was of course
before the revolution. And in a time when, as again
Perry Miller interprets the rubric, New England
had to reconcile itself to being a self-confessed
community of dissenters, it's way of life protected
against the Church of England only by the Toleration
Act of 1689. Hence Judge Dudley wanted
the fourth lecture to defend the validity of congregational
or Presbyterian-- that is non-Episcopal,
non-Anglican, ordination-- so that students should be
immunized against the doctrine of apostolic succession. So that by way of explanation
of the lecture that we'll have an in four years time--
in three years time now. In any case, Judge
Dudley in his will said that the lectures were
to be given in testimony of my umble desire that God
would be graciously pleased to accept this
poor thank offering from his unworthy servant for
his many and great mercies to me and my education
at the college and my sincere prayer and
desire for the favor of God to that society in
all ages to come. His will ends with this note. "Postscript, let him that
preaches the last lecture before mentioned be a sound,
grave, experienced divine and at least 40 years of age." That's for the fourth lecture. We don't have to hew to that
today you'll be glad to know, Professor Nasr. "And let those that preach
the several lectures after said have
their stipend or pay given them as soon as may be." And we do try to hew
to that very closely. Finally, I'll make
mention of the meeting of the board of trustees
at the university here, actually the
trustees of that time still with the
Dudleian lectures. We have a formed
group of trustees here under the auspices
now of the Divinity School, in 1911 I think still
under that of the college. At this meeting, the president
informed the trustees that the corporation
had desired him to use his influence with them
to omit the third Dudleian lecture on the idolatry
of the Romish church, their damnable heresies, and
other crying wickednesses-- that was all quotes
as you may imagine-- and to provide the other
three lectures in rotation. It was therefore voted
that the trustees concurred in this arrangement. So that's why we have lost
the aforesaid lecture. In any case, it's
a great pleasure in a long train of even
recently very distinguished speakers to welcome such a
distinguished person tonight. And I would like to ask
Professor Larry Sullivan, the director of our Center for
the Study of World Religions and a scholar who knows
certainly Professor Nasr's work very, very well, to please
do the honors of introducing him tonight. Larry? [APPLAUSE] Well thank you very
much, Dean Graham. It's a great honor to introduce
our esteemed colleague and good friend, Professor
Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Professor Nasr is one of
the world's leading experts on Islamic science
and spirituality and is currently
University Professor of Islamic Studies at George
Washington University. Professor Nasr is the
author of numerous books, including Man And Nature, The
Spiritual Crisis Of Modern Man, Religion and the
Order of Nature, and Knowledge of the Sacred. Some of these volumes
we'll have available. The bookstore has made them
available in our reception to which you're all invited
in the brown room at the end of this hall, the far
end of the building, after the presentation and
some questions and answers. I would not do justice in the
time allowed for the lecture to describe the rich and
fascinating career of Professor Nasr. But I would like for
a moment to sketch some of the salient features
of that fascinating trajectory for your own benefit and also to
set the context of his lecture this evening. He is currently a university
professor at George Washington University and is certainly,
without exaggeration, one of the most important and
foremost scholars of our time specializing in particular
in Islamic religious and comparative studies. He's the author of some
50 books and 500 articles which are translated into
the major Islamic, European, and Asian languages. And he is well
known and esteemed as an intellectual
figure in the west and throughout
the Islamic world. Professor Nasr has
trained generations of students over
the years since 1958 when he was a professor
at Tehran University. And then in America, since the
Iranian revolution of 1979, specifically at
Temple University in Philadelphia
from 1979 to '84, and at George Washington
since 1984 to the present day. He speaks and writes
with great authority on a wide variety
of subjects ranging from philosophy, to religion,
to spirituality, to music, law, art, and architecture, to
science, and literature, and to the civilizational
dialogue between cultures and as well as among cultures
and the natural environment. Professor Nasr was
born in 1933 in Tehran into a family of distinguished
scholars and physicians. His father, as I believe
his father before that, was a physician to the
Iranian royal family. And as a young
boy, Professor Nasr attended one of the
schools near his home and continued his
education I would say also at home on the
direction of his father and the circle of
philosophers and theologians that he participated in. Nasr arrived in America
at the young age of 12. And this marked the
beginning of a new period in his life, which was
quite different from that had unfolded up to that time. He attended the Peddie school
in Highstown, New Jersey. And in 1950 he graduated as
the valedictorian of his class. He chose then to go to MIT just
a couple of miles downstream. He was offered a
scholarship there and was, in fact, the
first Iranian student to be admitted as an
undergraduate at MIT. He began his studies at MIT
in the physics department. And then after his
first year of study he underwent what he
describes as a kind of crisis provoked by an awareness
of the oppressive atmosphere of an
overbearingly scientific view and an implicit positivism
contained within that. According to Professor
Nasr, it was the discovery of traditional metaphysics
and philosophia perennis which settled the crisis
that he had experienced and gave him the
possibility of gaining an intellectual
certitude which has never left him since that time. From that time
onward he was certain that there was such
a thing as the truth and it could be attained
through knowledge by means of the intellect
guided and illuminated by divine revelation. On his graduation from
MIT, Professor Nasr enrolled himself in
a graduate program in geology and geophysics
at Harvard University. And after obtaining
his master's degree in geology and
geophysics in 1956, he went on to pursue the PhD
in the history of science at Harvard. He had wanted to study other
types of science of nature apart from the
modern west and also to understand why modern science
has developed in the fashion that it has. It was here at Harvard
that he resumed his study of classical
Arabic, which he had set aside since coming to America. During his Harvard
years, Nasr also traveled widely to
Europe, especially to France, Switzerland,
Britain, Italy, and Spain, and thus widened his
intellectual horizons and established important
intellectual contacts. During these travels
to Europe, Nasr met the foremost traditionalist
writers and exponents of philosophia perennis,
Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt. He's made a tremendous
impact and made a decisive contribution to
his own intellectual formation and to his spiritual
life as well. He traveled to Morocco which
had great spiritual significance for him and embraced Sufism in
the form taught and practiced by the Sufi Saint of the
Magri, Sheikh Akmad al-Alawi. Alawi. Thus the years at Harvard
witnessed a crystallization of major intellectual
and spiritual elements in Nasr's mature
worldview, elements which have since
dominated and determined the course and pattern
of his scholarship and academic career. He graduated with a PhD from
Harvard at the age of 25 and turned down an offer to
become assistant professor at MIT in order to
return to teach in Iran. He was offered an
associate professorship of philosophy and
history of science at the Faculty of Letters
in Tehran University. Five years later,
at the age of 30, he became the youngest person
to become a full professor at that university. Furthermore, from 1968 to '72
he was made dean of the faculty, and for a while
academic vice chancellor of Tehran University. And through these
positions he introduced many important
changes, all of which were aimed at strengthening
programs in the humanities and particularly in philosophy. In 1972 he was appointed
president of Arya Mehr University by the Shah of Iran. Arya Mehr University was then
the leading scientific and technical university in Iran. And the Shah, as
the patron, charged Professor Nasr to develop the
university on the model of MIT but with firm and self-conscious
roots in Iranian culture. In 1973, the Queen of Iran
appointed professor Nasr to establish a
center for the study and propagation of philosophy
under her patronage. Hence the Imperial Iranian
Academy of Philosophy was established and soon
became a leading and important vital center of
philosophical activity in the Islamic world housing
the best library of philosophy in Iran and attracting some of
the most distinguished scholars in the field, both
from east and west. I could think of Enrico
[? Baj ?] and Toshihiko Izutsu for example, who worked there. Being Director of the Center for
the Study of World Religions, among the many different
lectures that Professor Nasr has given internationally I need
to call attention to the fact that he was the first visiting
professor at the Center for the Study of World Religions
and delivered the first lecture series there in 1962. And the book that resulted
from those lectures, Three Muslim Sages, I learned
just a moment ago is not only still
in print in English but has been recently
published in Bulgarian. So this work has had a
lifespan that we would all wish for our work. In 1979, at the time of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran, Professor Nasr moved with his
family to the United States where he would rebuild his
life and secure a university position to support
himself and his family. He began writing again. And he had been invited
already before his turn to the United States to
deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the
University of Edinburgh. And he then took up that honor. He was the first
Westerner to be invited to deliver what is arguably
the most famous lecture series in the field of natural
theology and philosophy of religion in the west. Currently among the many
significant activities that Professor Nasr is leading,
both in the Washington DC area and nationally as well
as internationally, he is involved in the production
of a major documentary television series on
Islam and the West which deals with some of
the most important and profound aspects
of the encounter between the Islamic and
Western civilizations. So it's a great pleasure that
he said yes to the invitation to deliver the Dudleian
lecture this evening. It will be on the
beginnings of consciousness. Please welcome Professor
Seyyed Hossein Nasr. [APPLAUSE] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
dear friends. I think the last time
I was in this hall I was arguing with the Hans
Kung about Islamic Christian dialogue. Today's discussion will be
somewhat less contentious but not philosophically
speaking. I'm glad I did not choose
to [INAUDIBLE] the question of Islam because I believe Islam
is also a revealed religion. It would not fit in that
category of natural religion. But actually the subject I
chose after being invited to deliver this oldest
of all formal lecturers at Harvard University
was a theme which has been very much on my
mind the last few years and entitled it, In the
Beginning Was Consciousness. This may sound a
somewhat strange title. But I chose this on purpose. I believe that we are
at the present moment at the cusp of
the curve of life, what the French call
[FRENCH] of the paradigm which has dominated
Western civilization since the Renaissance. And this transformation that is
coming about has at its heart this question as we
shall find out very soon. It was about 50 years
ago right on this campus when with Thomas Cohen, who
died recently unfortunately before finishing his work,
a major American philosopher of science as many of you
know, and a few others were struggling and
grappling and wrestling with this question
of paradigm shifts. He and I did not exactly
agree on what it was. But we both felt that there was
a major change that is afoot. And of course these things
do not come so quickly, as he himself pointed out. It is very important writings. It takes some time. But I do believe
that it is a time that the most important
questions that face present day civilization will involve
not only solutions within the present parameters
within which we think, but those parameters themselves. That is, the
paradigm within which human beings carry out
their intellectual and also practical activities. So in the beginning
was consciousness. And the original
title of my talk was not only In the
Beginning Was Consciousness, but In The Beginning
Is Consciousness. Because this in the beginning
is not simply a past time. It involves a principio reality. Let me begin by
quoting from several of the sacred
scriptures of the world. In the Rigveda, the oldest of
all Hindu sacred scriptures, we read, "one alone is the
dawn beaming over all this. It is the one that
severally becomes all this." The one who is [SANSKRIT],, that
is all three being blessed, state of being blessed, or in a
state of bliss, and of course, consciousness, [SANSKRIT.] Same in the Tao Te Ching,
the primary text of Taoism and also its influence upon
neo-Confucianism of course we all know. "The nameless Tao is the
beginning of heaven and earth. The name Tao is the
mother of 10,000 things." So at the origin,
you have the Tao, which in fact is consciousness. We come to consciousness
in a moment. And of course, we all
know the book of John. "In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In chapter six of
the Book of John Christ said that "my
word is spirit and life." So this word is not simply
word in the ordinary sense but it's the spirit and life. And finally in the Koran
in chapter 36 [ARABIC],, "but his command when
he intendeth a thing is only that he saith
unto it be, and it is. [ARABIC]"" And so
the origin is very explicitly said in the Koran
to be the command of God, which is self as
the word amr, A-M-R, is considered to be on the
level of what you call logos in the logos theories of
theology and philosophy, those doctrines. Now when we turn to
tradition philosophies all over the world, we see this
almost remarkable unanimity. We think of the zero, of
the lambda, of Pythagorus. We think of the two
Agathon, of Plato, Aristotle's divine intellect. We think of the Essay
of St. Thomas Aquinas, with a capital E of course
which is also consciousness, which knows a divine being. And this correspondence,
of course, in Islamic philosophy to
which St. Thomas Aquinas was so close. And outside of the circle
of Western Asia and Europe and the Abrahamic
world of course, we think of atman in
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] in Hindu metaphysics which is pure
consciousness, the self, which is the origin
of all things. And also the role of the
Tao in the neo-Confucian philosophies of the
12th, 13th century. You can go on and on and on. So where is the exception? The exception really is to be
found in the world in which we happen to be living. Before modern times
there were philosophies for which consciousness was not
primary and in the beginning. We see that in the
Greco Roman antiquity. We see it in certain
schools of Hinduism. But they were really minor. They did not dominate
over the vision, over the world view,
the weltanschauung, of the civilizations
in question. And in all of
these civilizations there was a mentality in which
"in the beginning" did not imply only a beginning in
time somewhere back there. We shall come back to that. It's very important. It's very significant
that in English we say, in the beginning was the Word. In the vulgate it says,
[LATIN] So in the principia, in principal, was the word. And not only temporally. And these other civilizations
were all very, very fully aware of this. Now the reality of the
primacy of consciousness begins in modern times
and the end of Renaissance especially with the
scientific revolution. Before I turn to that,
it's very important if we're going to
be philosophically serious of course, to define
what we mean by consciousness. Those people who believe
that philosophy should only deal with what is
operationally definable, that is making philosophy
a handmaid of physics and engineering, accord
the certain concept with which I do not deal. Namely what's behind
me, the word Veritas, which should be taken off,
not put in the philosophy department, because that cannot
be defined from the point of operational methods that is
used in analytical philosophy. But the universal concept
of the philosophies, to that which I'm appealing and
the traditional understanding of philosophy, which also
is very rigorous but not necessarily operational
because it's impossible to define
consciousness operationally. Every time you try to define
consciousness operationally, you have to make
use of consciousness in order to do so. It's like the famous saying of
Pascal that you cannot define to be, because every time
you use a sentence you say, [FRENCH], that is, it is. And you're already
using the verb to be in order to define it. So of course then you
have a circular argument and that's not acceptable. Now it's a paradox that
something as obvious as consciousness cannot be
externally and operationally defined. That is true. But we all know what
consciousness is. Even if through some kind
of solipsism or at least a kind of inward way
of deluding ourselves of being the only reality
might deny the world out there, or through some
kind of sophism try to deny the reality
of consciousness, we do so in both cases through
the use of consciousness. Consciousness is the most
primary reality with which we judge every other reality. Consciousness for these
traditional civilizations, for original philosophies,
was not a state. It was a substance. It was not a process. It was something that
was like being itself, which was at once
luminous and numinous, at once knowing and
knowing that it's knowing, knowledgeable of
its own knowledge. At once the source of all
sentience, of all experience, and beyond experience
by having knowledge that is experiencing something. That is why even the most
skeptical philosophers had a great deal of
trouble negating it, even those who were skeptics
from a religious point of view. We have the supreme example
of that, of skepticism, of course in the famous
Cartesian method. Descartes was I think wrong
in many ways but he was right in one thing and that is that if
you doubt everything you cannot doubt the fact that
you're doubting. And it's from this
comes, of course the famous, cogito ergo sum--
the cogito of Descartes. That is, I think,
therefore I am. The therefore is unfortunate,
because that therefore has other consequences. Descarts should have said,
I think therefore God is, but he forgot that. But nevertheless, the fact
that if you negate everything, you doubt everything, you cannot
doubt the instrument by which you're doubting. And if you think this
begins with Descartes, the great Persian philosopher
Avicenna, over 1,000 years ago, talks about the hanging
man, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].. That is, a man hung in
the middle of space. So his feet do not
touch anything. His hands do not touch anything. He doesn't know where he is. He can doubt the
existence of the earth. He can doubt the
existence of the air. There's nothing that
he can not doubt. The one thing he cannot doubt is
himself that is doubting other things. So in fact Descarte's argument
is not the beginning of it in the history of philosophy. There have been other instances. Anyway, even the skeptical
philosophers in days of old did not deny the primacy
of consciousness. The question was, what
mode of consciousness? What kind of consciousness? But I don't want to spend
my whole lecture just defining consciousness. I want to get back to
the significance of it metaphysically and
its loss for our life religiously and otherwise. Now as I said, I believe
that it was really at the beginning of the
scientific revolution that, in the beginning
was consciousness, was seriously challenged. At first it was not
challenged outwardly by those who were
the great masters who created modern science. Especially certainly not by
Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton both of whom had even
a mystical aspect of religion and believed not
only in God but they believed in a kind of
mystical vision of God each in his own way. And even Galileo
the maverick, he could not even imagine denying
that God created the world. That was not the in the
point of discussion. But once having set up this
world view in which God becomes only the creator of
the world, two things set in. First of all, the
levels of consciousness are all in a sense
reduced to a single level. That is, the
multi-leveled structure of the world of
consciousness which you had traditionally,
from divine consciousness to the
consciousness of the angels, of the great intellects, of
the great saints and sages, all the way to our consciousness
of ordinary human beings, that was all reduced to a
single level of reality. And people spoke
of consciousness as being ordinary
human consciousness. The second consequence, which
is even more devastating from the point of
our discussion here, was that it was accepted
that God created the world and of course God had
consciousness because he knew. He is the knower. And had all the other
attributes which we attribute to consciousness. But after that, he had
nothing to do with it. There's a deistic position
which came to the fore for a long time and gradually
replaced the theistic position after Paley and others natural
theism sort of went out of the window in England. And many of these lectures
on natural theology are troubled in the late 19th
century, early 20th century, on this very issue. Natural theology was considered
to be, in fact, an oxymoron, not having any real
significance and meaning. So that theism was a
very temporary matter. What lasted much longer was
a deism within which we still function to a large extent. During the last 40
years we keep talking about the big bang theory, big
bang theory, big bang theory. There have been
lectures even held on how that is related to
perhaps to the [INAUDIBLE] looks of the book of Genesis
or [ARABIC] of the Koran and the Abrahamic world
of seeing a creator god create the world suddenly. And this is very theological. But the consciousness of
God is irrelevant to this because once the big
bang has taken place and the universe is
there, we are not interested in any
consciousness in the universe. There's no such thing. It is always energies
or material particles. So consciousness is taken
out of God's creation. And that is what takes
place in the 17th century. And it becomes an epiphenomenon
in the human state to which I shall turn in a moment. It is with the help of
this mechanical view of the universe, complemented
by the Darwinian Theory of Evolution in
the 19th century, that essentially the
category of consciousness becomes irrelevant
in human life. It becomes irrelevant even if
you believe that God created the heavens and the earth. For everyday life it's
in the sense of, so what? As far as the science
says, our attitude towards things, our
situation in the world is concerned, if you accept
that scientific point of view. And it is this which led finally
to the idea of always trying to explain by reduction. And that's one of the most
important characteristics of modern thought, explanation
through analysis but not through synthesis. That is, the whole is never
greater than its parts. And therefore we are always
after ultimate particles. When I was a physics
student at MIT they thought that
within five years we'll discover all the
ultimate particles of matter. I mean, the Nobel Prize
winning physicist. 50 years later, we're still
looking for ultimate particles. And we'll be running and
then particles be running. And we'll never catch up to them
because a metaphysical reason. A cat is not just a
few billiard balls that just happen
to be very small and we just haven't found
the little ones in the corner and put them up together
and we create the universe. But we have this idea as
soon as we go to a doctor's office, that's what's at play. We are reduced to what
the MRI says on the board. And the rest of us
doesn't count [INAUDIBLE] was done in the MRI. And that is reduced to
the biology, biology to the chemistry,
chemistry to the physics, and so on and so on. This reductionism
which then takes hold and in which, in fact, if you
even talk about consciousness it is irrelevant as
far as, as I said, this even science of
the body is concerned. It's only now that
Harvard University has started a
spirituality and healing program at the medical
school six, seven years ago because we only know too well
how our consciousness does affect our body in
remarkable ways. But it's not supposed to. We cannot explain it
according to the model, the prevalent model,
that is around. And we finally end
up at the tail end where we enter into the realm
of quantum mechanics in which, again, paradoxically we
have to accept consciousness because we can never know
anything without observing it. And the question that
[INAUDIBLE] that some of you may have heard of, that
physicists have spoken of-- of course, most of this
is not accepted-- that we have psychic particles, that is
consciousness particles, along with neurons
and so and neutrons and all the other
things that are around. That itself is a way of
trying to come to terms. So we end up with this
paradox that we cannot really understand the universe
quantum mechanically without a consciousness to
observe the events. And what makes the vector
collapse, the state vector collapse, which is a very
important philosophical issue, whether it's us as observer
or god as the creator. A lot of debate has taken place. But anyway, the element
of consciousness has grabbed us by the
neck and won't let us go. And then the remarkable
thing is that when we come to the end
of this period, of the gradual dissolution of
this Renaissance 17th century paradigm, the other extreme
enters into Western society. For example, Hinduism
is at the antipode the 17th century view in which
everything has consciousness. The stone's being is a form
of stony consciousness, if I can use such
an English term. But in Hinduism that would
be perfectly understandable. In our terms, it's
not understandable. And up the line all the
way to human beings. And it's not parapsychism. That's quite something else. So you have the Hindu
doctrines, other ideas coming from the east. And then you have all the
occultism and the pseudo sort of religious elements
we talk about, panpsychism and all
kinds of things coming into that very world
which had negated the reality of consciousness
from everything in the world except the human
beings, and perhaps God. If you believe in God,
if you believe or not was irrelevant to our
situation in the world as far as the world around
us was concerned. Now this vanishing of
consciousness from the cosmos, denying that in the
beginning was consciousness and also in principle
is consciousness at the present moment, has
had very deep consequences I believe for the human
state, for what we are suffering through, what
we're going through today. And I thought that it
would be important to say a few words about it. Let's not forget that we
don't want to accept this. But the scientific theory
is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon in
the cosmos possessed by very irrelevant people
on a very irrelevant planet in a very irrelevant
galaxy who happen to know all of these things
to say that they're all irrelevant. But that part
nobody talks about. That second part
nobody talks about. So it's not really
considered to be a major reality in the cosmos. In fact, it's not
even a minor reality. It's practically not there. We have a cosmos
which is not only dead but without consciousness. And nevertheless, consciousness
studies it in a particular mode of consciousness that we have. Now what are the
consequence of this? First and foremost was the
withering of religious life by reducing levels
of consciousness to the lowest and
the most ordinary. I believe one of the reasons
for the withering of mysticism within Western Christianity-- not only Protestant Christianity
but to some extent Catholic Christianity-- was this loss of the vision
of levels of consciousness. In medieval times, or
even in the Renaissance, Teresa of Avila had visions of
Christ and so with and so on. That meant something
within that universe. Whereas with
Swedenborg was having his visions in Stockholm,
with the Swedenborg interest down the streets, that
didn't mean anything in the scientific
culture of that time. And so the position
of Swedenborg's vision in the Christianity
of the 18th century is very different from
that of Teresa of Avila and the Catholicism
of the 16th century. So it had a very important
effect upon religious life. And also it had a very
important effect, of course, upon cutting off man's
consciousness from the higher levels of consciousness,
which did not go away by our denying them. That's taking away the ladder. If you said there's no third
floor in this building, you'll not try to go
up to the third floor. And therefore the quest
for transcendence, for the empowering,
you might say, and illuminating of
our consciousness which was always the goal of
all traditional civilizations, became irrelevant. Our desire for perfection
became horizontalized, getting more and
more information but not necessarily
luminous knowledge, which means a transformation
of one's consciousness. Another consequence of this
was the realities of religion became lost. They became either meaningless
or reduced to metaphors or simply historical accidents,
and so forth and so on. It's not accidental that all of
these philosophies of religion that developed in the 19th
century onward are either based on historical reductionism, of
reducing historical realities to what can be understood
materially and denying everything which cannot
be proven in a laboratory at Oxford or Harvard. Since we cannot walk on water,
Christ could not have walked on water certainly. And therefore if people
say he did walk on water either they were blind or
they had been as well educated as us or it has
some other meaning. So the whole question
of the language of religion, the way it spoke
to humanity from the greatest miracles of families of religion
to everyday religious life, of course became unreal. The turning away
in droves of people from religion in the
18th and 19th century is not at all accidental. That is, the religion addresses
the humanity in a universe which is full of consciousness. Not only is the divine
reality conscious. You have hierarchy of angels,
of various conscious beings, now reduced to UFOs. I shall come to them
in just a moment. Or in the non Abrahamic
world, in the Buddhist Tibetan tradition of all of the
hierarchy of the various Buddhas and [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
and all kinds of beings and intermediate worlds. The world of Hinduism, all
the gods and goddesses. And you can just
go down the line. There's no religion in
which the universe is not filled with consciousness. Even with these most
rationalistic Muslims who try to interpret Islam in a very
dry and rationalistic manner, cannot deny the reality of the
archangel Gabriel without which they would not have been
a Koranic revelation. They cannot deny the verse of
the Koran in which this was written. But this became a very, very
important issue that in a sense reduced the understanding
of the language of religion and caused this panic among
many people, this fervor to try to reinterpret it. All the way from
atheists to theists, from Karl Marx to Schleiermacher
in the 19th century. And in the 20th century
all different kinds of interpretations of
something which people did not have to explain in the old
days because it was part of their general world view. It was part of the universe. God could speak to the
trees as well as to us. And angelic beings could
manifest themselves. They could bring knowledge. Knowledge, consciousness,
were unlimited, of course, to the human order. And it even affected
the relationship between the human being and God. Now it is true that
these events did not destroy the reality of God
in the minds of many people. But it did affect
that relationship. Even the question of prayer,
and the efficacy of prayer. How does God answer prayer? Of course in a mechanistic
universe in which consciousness is put at the beginning in time,
this is a very difficult thing to explain rationally. What are the agencies
through which the divine can come into our lives? And so it had to be
done through emotions. Most theologians
in the West tried to explain this emotionally
without really confronting intellectually in the
most rigorous sense the challenge of the
mechanistic universe. They try to circumvent it. And of course, Christian
theology suffered a great deal. It suffered a great
deal in the battles that were fought because
you had to accept more and more scientific
point of view. Even today we have
all this movement for better relations
in religion and science started by the
Templeton Foundation. I've been their adviser
for several years but I don't have time now. I withdraw myself. But it's always the
theologians have to give. The scientists have
never to give anything. It's always the theology that
is retreating step by step. And therefore it left,
of course, a deep imprint upon theological concerns. One of which we now
pay for a great deal, and that is the
lack of attention to nature as a
theological category which left Christianity
in the 17th century and has only come
back in our own time. So I'm going to come
back in a moment. Another important
consequence of that is really the loss of the
meaning of being human. What does it mean to be human? Don't think this is
just an academic matter. Of course we say someone with an
immortal soul, for a Christian. Again we come back,
we have consciousness of only being human, of having
a human soul and God being the Spirit with the
capital S. And that's it. What about being human towards
the rest of God's creation? What does that entail? What does that mean? Leaving out the animal
and plant rounds. And then also within
the human being, where is the relationship
between our being human as an immortal soul and
the rest of our body? The indifference to the body
as a source of wisdom which came about, and a sudden
rediscovery in the 1960s through sexuality and loud
music and all kinds of things are trying to reassert
the reality of the body was a reaction really to this
which goes back precisely to what happened with this loss
of the sense of the presence of consciousness
throughout reality. More difficult than
that was that not only was the sense of the
sacredness of human life put into question,
because the word sacred doesn't mean anything in
the context of modern science. It's just pure sentimentality. But what happened was that
human beings lost their home. That is, we became
homeless in the cosmos. Every tradition of
humanity felt it had a position in the universe. And they say, oh,
how childish it was that you had
this Ptolemaic system with the Earth in the middle
and all of the heavens above, a sense of pride that we
were in the middle of things. There is no sense of pride. We are also the lowest
point of things. But at least Dante
knew where he was. But for better or for
worse, he knew where he was. And the Mesoamericans,
[INAUDIBLE] Sullivan studied
in the Amazon, they feel they know where they are. We don't know where we are. I mean, we do not have
a home in the cosmos. There's a very profound
sense of alienation. And that is what is brought
into the English language the word alien in the new sense. Not only has it brought
psychological alienation, which is one of the
maladies of the modern world from which traditional societies
suffered much less, much less. Alienation is one
of our, like AIDS is a really modern ailment. Not that no one
was ever alienated before but this strong sense
of alienation to a large extent comes from the fact that if we
think this through and accept this reductionist worldview
that came in the 17th century, cutting of consciousness from
the world in which we live, we are very lonely here. We are alienated in this cosmos. The cosmos is not a
hospitable place for us. And of course if we
sit down and calculate what are the probabilities
of our being here? And it comes out to be
extremely, extremely, extremely small, then that makes
it even stranger. But we won't get into
all those discussions. As you know, the possibility
of one cell being just created by accident is, as
they've said, is like a monkey banging on-- at
that time it were typewriters. Now it's computers,
and producing Hamlet. It's about the same, [INAUDIBLE]
model the Shakespeare plays. But even if that
happened, and we try to put that in a
corner of our mind, we feel that we don't belong
here if we take this seriously. That's why we don't
take it seriously. Any person who walks
down the street and smells the flowers,
so how beautiful. That person is not
taking this point of view seriously even if
he's a professor teaching at his class. Because our human psyche,
in order to remain sane, has to feel at home somewhat. And this has nothing to do with
the mystical alienation, which a lot of these people writing
on the environment today have confused the two. Mystical alienation
of the world is to realize that our home
is ultimately paradise. It is the angelic world. And we are on a journey here. This is not our permanent home. We are on a journey here. That's very different from
feeling that, in fact, this has nothing to do with us. We don't belong here. It is a very different sense. And the two should
not be confused. It's as if you come to Harvard
University for four years as a freshman until senior. Now this is not
your permanent home. But nevertheless, you feel
you belong to Harvard. These years are spent here. They're creative. And you try to take
care of your dorm to some extent of
you're a boy student. The women student
might somewhat neater. But anyway you're living
in here for a few years. You don't want to live
in the garbage can. Whereas, that's not the
way how modern man feels. The world around us from
which we're alienated also becomes worthless in a
sense, and therefore of value only as far as our
own immediate impulses and so-called needs, which
are really usually mostly pseudo needs, are concerned. But the catastrophe
that it brings about with the world
of nature, and I want to return to this point. The consequences of the
alienation from the world and this loss of vision
of consciousness as being, in a sense, omnipresent
throughout creation most of all, of course
is in the relation that has been created between
modern man and nature-- modern men and women. I wish it were true that only
men ruin the environment, that women save the environment. They should be made the head
of every company in the United States immediately
and solve the problem. But unfortunately the issue
is much more complicated than that. But I'm using the one man here
in an older sense of the term, not male. But anyway, the human
being and the environment-- this issue, of course, is
now very much in the center of our attention. I remember that right in this
library in the early '60s, I spent the summer when I
was teaching here at Harvard doing research on the
book that came out as Man And Nature, the
Rockefeller series of lectures, which I delivered the year after
at the University of Chicago, which is still in print. Like [INAUDIBLE]
said, you were sort of foretold the
environmental crisis. None of the theologians either
here, some of them my friends, or in England, were at
all interested in what I was saying because
the theology of nature was a non-existing category. Nobody was interested in this. And they said, what is all
this you're talking about? And they were angry
at me for even speaking about these matters. The fact that the
environmental crisis has a religious,
theological, spiritual basis. It's not just about engineering,
as some people think. It has a deeper root. And I think it has
everything to do with what we think of the world around us. I mean, what is this tree
I'm looking at in the window? If it's just wood
for my fireplace, if the fox is just skin to
put around my wife's neck, and this mountain just iron from
which to extract and make cars, that's a very different
attitude than if I look upon these things as
sharing my own reality. Let me put it in a very
common everyday sense. Like we do with our pets. I mean, none of us would accept
to have fried cat for dinner. God forbid. My cat is right now
in the hospital. I just paid $1,000
since yesterday just to get her operated. So I sympathize. I love animals. But we will never think of it,
those who are animal lovers, because that animals
shares in our reality. We talk to our cat, even, or
a horse or a dog and so forth. We feel they have consciousness. If we had accepted
the Cartesian view, these are mechanical beings
sort of creatures, machines, that do not share
in our reality we would do with them
what we have been doing with the macro
nature around us-- decimating it. Decimating in the
name of human needs and sitting on a limb
of a tree and cutting it without knowing that we're
going to fall down and break our neck very soon. And the great tragedy
is, I don't even want to talk about
these issues anymore. The last two years it's
been put on the back burner as if it were a minor
issue about, let's say, how to improve
the saddle of horses in Texas or something. That would have been
on top of the list if I been in the wrong states,
let's say Massachusetts. And we don't think
about it anymore. But it's, of course, a
crucial, crucial matter which I believe is a direct
consequence of our alienation from the world in which
there is no participation in the same reality. Because not even if we say,
oh, my body is made of stardust and I share this, the
dust of the stars. This is all nice poetry. But there's been a darn thing
because what conscious do I have of my own dust,
except a reality within my consciousness? And when I identify
myself with the star, it has to be something
that identifies with my consciousness? Otherwise the word D-U-S-T,
what in the heck does it mean? It has to be something
for which has meaning within my consciousness. And that's what's lacking. Now to get a more
philosophical issue, when you negate that in the
beginning was consciousness and you end up with this
idea of consciousness being an island within
certain creatures known as human beings who occupy
a certain planet called the Earth, how do we know? How can we know anything? The Cartesian bifurcation has
never been solved in solution. Everything we say is really
not the complete solution. How do I know that
something is out there? Because I cannot say that
the neurons in my brain is reacting. So what? Neurons and consciousness
are not the same thing. It's a very, very big
jump, very big jump. It's like the jump
between the board or canvas and the painting
by Rafael on top of it. They're not the same thing. We just say there's something
to please ourselves. But really, how is it possible
for us to know the world out there if there is no common
category, nothing that unites the nor and the non. This enfeeblement of methodology
which was never a problem for traditional philosophies--
nobody was really very much concerned because it was
very easy to explain-- has everything to do with the
total and radical partition between what we call
consciousness and matter. Whatever the word matter means. I don't even want to use it. But the material
world, corporeal world. There's a very, very deep
categorical absolute division between consciousness
and matter. And therefore how can
one know the other? Now we don't claim
that matter knows us. We don't claim the other way. Because knowing is one of the
attributes of consciousness. And since we do not attribute
any power of consciousness to matter, material things,
we do not say that they know. I was asked the question of
one of my physics professors-- I was telling my friend doctor
more about this the other day. This question when I was
at MIT, I said, look, we just studied
integral calculus and we learned that
you can integrate the trajectory of
a particular object that you throw into the
air through mathematics to find out exactly
what that trajectory is and where that thing will land. Now this object, this little
pebble or whatever it is that you're throwing out, obviously
does not know any calculus and cannot integrate
the function. How does it know
exactly where to go? Why does it never miss? Why does it always
go to the same place? Oh, these are laws of nature. Don't ask about these things. They're in physics. But he really didn't
answer the question. If you had the traditional
understanding of nature, that's not so difficult. Supreme
consciousness, in a sense, impinges through various
levels of reality, upon the ether and the
ether upon the elements and the elements upon
what we see out there. Certain norms, certain
orders, which then we observe. And so even the
laws of nature which we're able to observe, far
from being simply subjective whims and fancies-- which
scientists would not accept either, they
believe it to be objective-- has a reason
why it's objective. And it's understandable. It's coherent from
that point of view. But of course, this is something
that we can no longer rely upon in the way that we think
about known or unknown. And this leads me to another
very important point. Since we become marginalized,
since consciousness has become marginalized,
since we categorically deny the possibility
of consciousness outside of the
human domain, we are at a loss what happens when
something in the human domain goes outside of this room
that we have determined for it and either seeks or claims to
find consciousness elsewhere. This problem never
existed before. The question of UFOs,
aliens, abductions-- now look, this too easy to say
these are all crazy people. Throw them into those
asylum, that's it. All civilizations have
negated and rejected people who had a world view
other than the dominant world view of that civilization. But they didn't do it
in the name of science. We do it in the name of science. We had a very famous professor
at Harvard, John Mack, who studied hundreds of
cases of this clinically, scientifically. And even if you do not accept
that these people are telling the truth, this is
related to something that is a kind of deep
urge of connectedness with intelligence,
with consciousness, beyond our immediate
human terrestrial sphere. And it's not accidental. It's not part and parcel of
pop culture, of common culture. Children are brought up
with it, movies on aliens and so forth, science fiction. What function does this fill? What is it doing? Why is it that so many people
are interested in these things? They've taken the
place, actually, of all accounts of non-human
intelligence and consciousness in traditional civilizations. And somewhere in the works
of Tolkien and so forth the two meet together. That is, of fairy tales,
of stories of angels, of very celestial beings-- every civilization
was full of these. And it percolated into
books read for children, stories told by grandmothers,
to people at the smallest age. And it satisfied the very, very
deep yearning of the human soul for companionship, companionship
in the world in which we live. When you cut that off, when
that is no longer relevant, it becomes a fairy tale. When we say in
English fairy tale, that mean something
that is false. A myth means something
unreal rather than real. Myth was the reality. Now it's unreality. When we change all
of these things, then we cannot act in a vacuum. In its place comes
all of these things that you see, this phenomena
of first of all science fiction itself, much of it
dealing with an attempt to try to fill this as a pseudo
sacred, you might say, writing. And all that these
claims of visions are films which sold
millions and millions. Why does the child want to see
some strange extraterrestrial looking very strange
touching it and so forth? And why is that person good? Why is that alien good
and so on and so forth? These are extremely
profound issues which deal with the total
psyche of a society which has been banned from having
contact or even thinking there's possible contact within
a universe in which there's other form of not only
life but of intelligence and of consciousness. Also, this alienation
has made a sham, really, of the metaphysical and
philosophical basis of ethics. This is a very big
claim that I'm making. It's really a subject
for another day. Some other person
should talk about this. But let me just say
a word about it. In all periods of
human history, ethics was related to a
vision of reality. Had a cosmic aspect. We think of the
Battle of Ahriman who are Muslims, Zoroastrianism. You think of the trees of
St. Augustine on the good. We think of neo-Confucianism. You can go to whatever
word you're going to. That's the kind of
permanent condition of all serious ethics. That is, ethics was never only
human ethics for human beings. It had a cosmic aspect. It had a cosmic aspect. There was a triangle, for
the Abrahamic world at least. You had God, or in
Hinduism Ishvara. You had the human being. And you had the
world, the cosmos. And in the world of ethics
there was a correspondence. What we have done is that,
through this depleting of the cosmos in which we
live, of consciousness, made any ethical act towards
the world of nature contrived. We say we are, let's
say, Christians. We're following
Christian ethics. And I am being very
respectful to my neighbor and thou shalt not kill
and so forth and so on. But why should not
one cut a tree, why should one not kill a
particular animal, and so forth and so on? In the old days, in the
Old and New Testament, there were explanations
given for this. Animals also had
souls and so forth. But that has been all gone. And any kind of
environmental ethics which is based on this
atomistic or scientistic-- I don't call it scientific--
scientistic view of the world is based on sentimentality. It is not based on reality if
you accept that as reality. It's based on sentimentality. It's like saying
sacredness of human life. In one breath we say
sacredness of human life but the next breath we
say we're nothing but DNA. What is sacred about DNA? It's just some molecules
banging against each other in certain configurations. If you reject the
sacred, if you reject that the imprint upon the
DNA is a theological concept that the word of God being
imprinted upon DNA which is a meaningless statement
in modern biology, where does the
sacredness come from? But in the human
world we can still do. But even the withering
away of Christian ethics, which now we see before us
after several hundred years of Christian ethics
surviving in a world in which its cosmological
basis was gone. This withering away has
to do a lot with this. And especially when it comes
to environmental ethics, which if we do not create
in a serious way we're not going to
live in the future. That's why these people,
let's say who are animal activists, people
like that, they are outside of the mainstream. The mainstream
cannot accept them. They're called nutty
people, crazy people, who tie themselves to trees and
so on and go on top of trees, refuse to come down and so
it will not be cut down. There's heroic acts
performed by Greenpeace going before big ships
with the little boats and so forth and so on. This is not part of our
mainstream because we cannot develop an environmental ethics
which is also in accord with the worldview which
dominates over our lives. That's why there's such
a disjunction for them in our hospitals with the
purely mechanical treatment of the human body and the
fact that some people believe they have a soul
and the human body is not just a mechanical gadget,
and all of these tensions that we see. And I think that's one of
the greatest challenges which the coming to end of this
worldview will pose for us. Finally, if we take
seriously the rejection of the idea of
consciousness being not only the beginning in
time but also in principle of the universe, it really
shatters all the deepest hopes of human beings. First of all, the
eschatological hopes, immortality, is
all become dreams. And that is why we are the
first time in human history the development of
a society in which the vast majority of people
do not harbor these hopes. Now they're coming back. A lot of people are coming back. But in Europe certainly
it still, that goes on. Great fear brings
these hopes back. But it doesn't accord
with the world view. If we come from time and
space we cannot transcend time and space. There's nothing
that ever existed at the omega point which
was not at the alpha point. I've written very strongly
against Teilhard de Chardin, those kinds of theologians who
believe that at the beginning was matter at the end of the
spirit because Christ said, I'm the alpha and the omega. Just didn't say, I'm the omega. And if we do not have a
root in consciousness, which is beyond time,
which is atemporal, we'll never return to there. And so the deepest aspirations
of human beings, which have always been for immortality
in the deepest sense, that is for an experience beyond
time and space based on the idea we are the only beings
always aware of that we die. Even if you're a good scientist
we know we are going to die. Not all the films we can
borrow from Blockbusters can prevent us from
thinking that the fact that sooner or later we'll die. Nothing, no diversion
can prevent us from that. And therefore, the
reality of human life which is the terminus
call of death and what that
implies spiritually, that has, of course, been
very, very strongly challenged. And I believe the time
has come, because I want to end, time has
come that we must take this challenge very, very
seriously to rethink what is consciousness in
relation to our life, in relation to the
life in which we live, the world in which we live, in
relation to our way of knowing, our sentience, our experience? And to also realize,
what are the consequences of the negation of the
primacy of consciousness? Although it is totally
logically absurd to deny the primacy of consciousness
because as soon as we do so we do it
through consciousness. But a lot of people
have done it. Many professors on this campus,
behavioral psychologists and the like, do
not believe there such thing as consciousness. It's logically absurd but
they do it nevertheless. But to realize, what are the
consequences of this for us human beings living in such
trying and difficult times? I believe that, of course,
ultimately consciousness will have the final say. But it is for us while
we have consciousness in this life, this
great, great gift, to use it in order to
understand what it means to live consciously, to
live fully with awareness, to know where we are coming
and where we're going. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [INAUDIBLE] Professor
Nasr [INAUDIBLE] questions if you'd like. So perhaps I'll
let you field them and then I'll
reappear in a moment. Yes, sir. Thank you. I'm not quite sure how to put
this question but I'll try. One thing that you left
out, which seems to me important in the development
of the modern psyche or the modern consciousness
is, Einstein and his theory of relativity where
he demonstrated that there are no such things,
in the natural world at least, as absolutes. And it seems to me that
has been the impetus of the modern theory
of relativism. Now I think there's valid
alternatives to that. But the alternative
seems to be absolutes where everything is it, or
relativism where nothing is it. And it seems to me that is
a challenge, not necessarily to religion because it seems to
me my faith, Christianity, does well in talking about
relationships which seems to me the basis of
Einstein's theory, of relationships
rather than absolutes. But it is a challenge
to philosophy because the Greek thought
was based a great deal on absolutes. And I know our culture is based
on Greek classical philosophy and Islamic culture is
based, to some extent, on Greek philosophy. And how do you
address this question or this problem of absolutes? First of all, to come
back to Einstein, Einstein never said
everything was absolute. He First of all
believed in the old one. And second, the
theory of relativity is based on the absoluteness
of the speed of light, which is now being challenged. And so that whole
theory of relativity is not being challenged. But we shall see whether
the theory of relativity stays relative or not. But even if you take this theory
of relativity to be absolute, that is itself the
first absolute. This is what we often do. Now to come back
to this question of absolute and
relative, I do not feel I have to deal with
theory of relativity because much of
what had occurred as far as consciousness
is concerned had occurred before Einstein
came upon the scene. But the question of
absolute and relative, because modern philosophy
does not accept any absolutes. It says everything is
relative except the statement that everything is
relative, which is absolute. And that's what is
logically absurd. But it says it nevertheless. In traditional philosophies
not everything is absolute. I don't know why you say that. Only God is absolute for them. In Islam only God is absolute. And everything else is
the domain of relativity and relationality. Well, one definition of absolute
is that it is non related. In traditional
philosophy, I believe, if something is absolute it
means it stands by itself. By itself, that's right. It's not related
to anything else. That's right. In Christian
theology, God is love which means that God is
related to everything. But if you say God, in Islam,
is absolute, which means that-- what does it mean? It means that he is the one,
above all relationality. I think every
Christian would also accept that God is absolute. Even Christ is absolute. Christians claim that
Christ is absolute. That's the problem we have
with religious dialogue. As soon as you say
God has only one son, that's an absolute statement. No, that's a different word. That's a true statement. That's a true statement. But it isn't-- No, but it's based
on absolutizing a particular concept,
a particular category. Anyway, this is not
really relevant completely to the subject my discourse. It's a very interesting
subject but the reason I didn't mention Einstein
because I didn't think that theory of relativity was
going to be relevant to what I was going to say. Anybody has any other questions? Yes sir. You're not supposed
to ask questions. You're supposed to bring
the session to an end. Something about a vacuum. I wanted to ask you about
this interesting remark that you made toward the
latter part of the talk about the presence of
elements in an alpha that would appear in an omega, the
union in some way of time. And I wondered what differences
you might consider or put forward in between, say, an
alpha condition and an omega state. I mean, is there something
about manifestation? Or a fullness of self-awareness
or self-consciousness in all elements? But would you take us
a few sentences further in your thoughts that
you [INTERPOSING VOICES]?? That's a very profound
metaphysical question. As far as God as the one,
the absolute, is concerned, there can be no difference. God cannot change
from my point of view. Or not, my point is irrelevant. From traditional point of
view, the point of philosophia perennis, cannot change
through transformation. But there is something
that happens. And this is very difficult
to explain in human terms. And the most difficult of
all theological questions is why God created the world. If he is perfect, why
did he create the world? And each tradition has
given a different answer. Christianity is a mystery. And somebody said
that God is love and so he wanted to create
the world in which he could give his only son and so forth. You know these things
better than I do. Islam has a very
interesting answer to this which has been commented
upon by Sufi commentators over the centuries. And that is the famous saying
of the hidden treasure in which God speaks in the first
person through the mouth of the prophet of Islam
in which the prophet says, "I was a hidden treasure." That is, God was
hidden treasure. "I wanted to be known,
therefore I created the world so that I would be known." That is you might say,
God is not only absolute but is also infinite. And being infinite he must
contain all possibilities. Containing all
possibilities he must contain the possibility
of his own negation, which is the world. And his coming to know of
himself outside of himself in a kind of objectivization
of his own reality in the mirror of his own
creation which is the world. And so there is, from that
point of view, a difference. Nothing is added to God,
but certain possibilities in the infinity of divine
nature are realized in this way. That's really all that
one can say of it. Yes? Do you believe
that there are ways to reestablish the
knowledge that you speak of of consciousness
and it's complete aspects? And if so, what are they? And if you don't
believe there are ways to establish
that or restore it in a large sense
among humanity, what is the logical consequence? First of all, I think it
is possible to restore it. But immediately,
not among the many. It starts from among the few. You first of all throw
a pebble in the pond and you have a
small circle, then it's larger and larger and
largest to larger people. I do not believe that is
possible to suddenly bring about a transformation
of the masses, you might say, especially
since the mass media and so forth are working
the other direction. But the fact that
we are never alone, we have very little chance
to deepen our consciousness. We are always, in a sense,
challenged or energized or [INAUDIBLE] or amused by
something outside of ourselves. You see very few people
even walking today without something
under the ear to listen to something coming from
the outside into their mind. So all the forces, in a
sense, are working against it. But at the same time,
there's no doubt-- there's no doubt in
my mind whatsoever there has been, in
the last few decades, a great deal of
attention made and paid in those sectors
of humanity which had been indifferent to
this into what the meaning of consciousness is in the
deeper sense and the knowledge that derives from it and how
to attend that consciousness. A lot of these pseudo religions
and so forth are based on that. They cater to this need. The need is there. There's no doubt about it. But I do not believe it will be
realized by either these pseudo gurus and so forth who are
opening up big shops or a radio station for the [INAUDIBLE]
of consciousness or things like that. It has to start with
the smaller groups, and then through,
really, education. Now, I don't mean
only formal education but education the larger
sense of the term. Even through the
arts and so forth, gradually perhaps it can
be somewhat expanded. But unfortunately I believe
that nothing of this will occur on a vaster
scale without some kind of catastrophe waking us up. There's nothing
better to be conscious when you're asleep than
when some animal bites you. You immediately wake up if
you are camping outdoors. We need one of those bites
before our hand is bitten off, we notice one little bite. And I've always said that's the
greatest grace we could receive from heaven, is to have
a little shock to wake up before we have a big shock from
which we might not wake up. Yes, sir. There is an experience,
religious experience, that's found in all cultures. The Muslims though
call it fana-- Fana. Fana? In the west sometimes called
mystical union or born again. In the Midwest they call it
the born again experience-- samadhi so forth. Could you talk
about consciousness during that experience? First of all, I don't
think all of these are necessarily the same,
especially born again. Because one can regain
faith in religion. You can have born again
Christian, born again Buddhist, born again Muslim. But not on that level
of fana or samadhi. Not every [INAUDIBLE] who
comes back to Buddhism-- even if we don't want to
mention that Midwest-- is going to receive samadhi. Nor every born again
Christian in Indiana is going to become
a Meister Eckhart. I wish that were the case
but that doesn't happen. But this is definitely
true in all religions and I should say
something about it. Let me just start with the
word fana, which you mentioned, which means
extinction in Arabic, which means extinction of our
consciousness, of ourselves. Not in the negative sense as
falling asleep or becoming drunk, but of the opening
of the consciousness to the divine reality which
is supreme consciousness or supreme reality where being
and knowledge are the same. And there's no use for
me to describe to you how this happens because
it seems to be something contradictory in it. That is, human beings
have the capability of being aware of
their own nothingness. Now, if you're nothing
how can we be aware? And so it's really
something experiential. That is, what it
really is is that the individual
human consciousness dies to its ordinary level of
awareness and consciousness-- that's the death part-- but participates in the
absolute consciousness of God. And what that means for
each person is different. But what it means also is that
the limits, the human limits, in a sense are erased
at the moment when this experience takes place. That's why some
mistakes have daringly spoken of union with
God, and I am God, and I'm swimming in the ocean
of God as Meister Eckhart said. Or [INAUDIBLE] said, I am
the truth and so forth. It's not the
individual ego anymore. The ego consciousness
has melted away. I was talking about the
levels of consciousness. And the consciousness opens up
what you were talking about, the supreme level. There are many
intermediate levels before you get to samadhi
or before you get to fana. You have to cross many other
stages of consciousness. But the ultimate is the opening
of our limited consciousness to the infinite
consciousness of the divine. That's what it is. I'll take two more questions. Yes? It was a fascinating talk. I'm really at a loss
how to put my question. But implicit I think
there are two points here. Your analysis of this
rupture between tradition and modernity, or
modern worldviews, and the consequences
that it has led to. I'm just wondering
that you dwell a lot on the scientific side. But are there areas to really
ponder upon in the tradition as well? Which may have-- In the what? Within the traditional
discourse itself, especially in the form of
[INAUDIBLE] traditionalism or the religious scriptures
and its limitations. Which perhaps--
limitations quote unquote-- which perhaps led the scientific
discourse to dispute that. And I just don't
know, is there a way to see some reconciliation
between the two rather than seeing
them as antagonistic? Although you didn't
say so explicitly. But what I'm wondering
is that two things. One is, how do we look
at the limitations of the religious
discourse as well? And also if we could find a way
not to see them as antagonistic and there is some ultimate
unity between the two then? First of all, there
are certain events that took place within both
the religious and philosophical circles in the west before the
scientific revolution which made the scientific
revolution possible. There's no doubt about that. There was only one sided story. It comes from both sides. Secondly, the question
of reconciliation. A lot of people have
spoken about that. Reconciliation
between what and what? That is, if you have an
absolute claim to a particular and understand the truth then
you cannot accept another claim which also has an
absolute claim. During the last few centuries,
almost every case that's been in the west religion which
has been conciliatory and given up, where science has
not given up anything. It's really the dominant power. It is, in a sense, the
religion of the modern world. I say that jokingly. That's why everybody wants to
sell products on television wears a white robe of a
doctor instead of a black robe of a priest, obviously. So it's not that you
have two equal forces. Now you give half
and you give half. Second, on the
question of the truth, it is not a question
of compromise. It's on the plane of
action you can compromise. But on the plane of truth,
neither religion nor science can compromise. What can be done is for-- and many individual
scientists have accepted that. But the scientistic
worldview does not accept that, including
most philosophers. Because philosophy in the
West since the 18th century, with a few exceptions, has
become a handmaid of physics since Kant. It is not independent
of modern science. So they run along with it,
except a few exceptions-- Kierkegaard, a few other people. Perhaps Hegel. The important thing is that in
the scientistic point of view, the scientific view of nature
is absolutized as being the only view of nature. And everything other than
that is rejected in total as being false. That is why even
deconstructionism, which is taking place
in the United States, on the ideas of
Derrida and [INAUDIBLE] and people like that. It takes place
most in departments of comparative literature,
not in the physics department. I mean, a few people
write about that but it doesn't
touch the sciences. Is deconstructing
the humanities. And the few who want to
deconstruct the sciences, they are thrown
out very quickly. So this idea of reconciliation
is a very good idea, but provided we do not lose
our sight of the truth. And neither religion
or science can do that. But it is possible to
reconcile, provided we have an idea of the
hierarchy of knowledge. In my book, Knowledge
and the Sacred, I've spoken about that
quite extensively. But if each side
claims for itself the absolute truth
and religion also does not make use of the deepest
resources of its teachings and just sticks to the most
superficial interpretation which has, in fact, no answer
to many of the questions posed by modern science, then no
reconciliation is possible. I think [INAUDIBLE] get
your second question. Last for you and the lady there. I think no women asked
a question, please. I'll come to you last. Are there no scientists-- I was under the impression that
there are some cosmologists now that are beginning to talk about
the underlying reality being consciousness. I attended one of
those Templeton-- That's right. --meetings of theologians
and scientists. And there were
several cosmologists who seem to be moving
in that direction. You're right. That's correct. And that's part
and parcel of what I said at the very beginning. We're coming to the cusp,
the end of this, what I feel is the curve of the life
of this type of scientism and the paradigm
that's dominated over the West for
several centuries. And that's one of
the signs of it. But that has not percolated into
the way we look at the world. Yes, there are a number
of psychologists, and cosmologists, and physicists
from different sides who speak about these matters, yes. But it has not become part and
parcel yet of our world view. The last question. As I've been listening-- Yes, why don't you use that
so everybody can hear you. OK. I hear a lot of resonance
in your thinking with the thought of Carl Jung. Jung, based on his own
clinical experience, posited a consciousness
that's autonomous. Doctrine of synchronicity, or
his sense of synchronicity, is that that consciousness
has operational effect that's complimentary to, if
not co-equal with, materialist cause and effect. And an article
called Answer to Job he talked about a god force, or
this higher consciousness that comes to a greater
awareness of itself through the increase of the
consciousness of humans. He even talked about
UFOs in one essay, as psychical synchronous kind
of product of our longing for company in the universe. Would you agree that a lot
of what you've said today is very much in harmony
with the thought of Jung? Not really. There are certain
things which I say-- And if not, then--
yeah, then I'd be interested to
hear why not, yeah. The things which I
said, some of them have also been mentioned
by Jung but interpreted a very different way. Jung first of all never
accepted a metaphysics which would transcend the psyche. He never spoke about
the divine intellect. He psychologized the
spiritual realities. For him there was no distinct
division, or separation, between pneuma and psyche-- that is, between the spirit
and the soul, or the psyche. And he saw everything on
the psychological level. Of course he was right in that
the psyche cannot be reduced to the material
aspects of the body. That much I agree with him. But where we disagree
is first of all, the difference between
the spirit and the psyche. Secondly, the source of, for
example, symbols which Jung sees in the unconscious,
the common unconscious, of a particular ethnic
group or society. Whereas for people
like myself, we believe that a numinous
and transcendent source above the psyche. And also Jung was
really afraid of coming to face the reality of God. He evaded it. He evaded it as
much as he could. And whenever in his
life an occasion came for him to meet a very
important spiritual authority of various religions
he tried to evade it. Because I think this idea of
psychologizing the spiritual, seeing people like that
threatened that vision. The spiritual is not
the psychological. And the seat of consciousness
is not in the psyche. It is beyond the psyche. But the psyche shares
in it definitely. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
