Meet
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A Conversation with Elisabet
Sahtouris
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits,
not found in the book)
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. (www.sahtouris.com),
is an American/Greek evolutionary biologist, futurist,
and U.N. consultant on indigenous peoples. She is
a popular lecturer, television and radio personality,
author of EarthDance, A Walk through Time: From Stardust
to Us, and coauthor with Willis Harman of Biology
Revisioned. Dr. Sahtouris has taught at the University
of Massachusetts, M.I.T., and was a science writer
for the Nova/Horizon TV series. Her vision is the
sustainable health and well-being of humanity within
the larger living systems of Earth and cosmos.
We asked Elisabet about how science has influenced
our view of divine intelligence. “Western science
is built on assumptions that we live in a non-living
universe,” she observes. “That’s
an unproven basic assumption, a mere belief. You assume
that the universe is non-living because you believe
that to be the case. Only our culture thought up this
concept of non-life within which life has to emerge.
There’s logic behind choosing to see Nature
as non-living mechanics because European men had invented
machinery and if the universe were non-living and
were mechanical, then it would be easy for them to
understand it. So they projected their machine-making
creativity onto God himself; they called God the ‘grand
engineer of the machinery of nature.’ And then
they said it was the other way around, of course,
that men were created in God’s image so that
they too could create machinery.
“Western scientists abstract those elements
of nature that can be described mechanically and ignore
the rest, which is why they are not comfortable talking
about things like consciousness – because they
can’t put a yardstick on it. It’s not
quantifiable. No matter how far inward or outward
we go, we don’t seem to find limits to human
consciousness. I find it peculiar that our own minds
are ignored. Scientists talk about models of science
as existing apart from us – objective. Yet many
experiments demonstrate that objectivity is a myth
and that experimenters’ intentions actually
influence the outcomes of their experiments. We’re
in a participatory universe, and no human being –
scientist or not – has ever had an experience
outside of our consciousness. It seems like scientists
should have to take that into account and at least
state that anything we come up with is a model of
the universe as perceived through human consciousness.
We see our world through the lens of our consciousness,
and there’s no other lens that we can see through.
We have to interpret our perceptions through our human
consciousness to make sense of them.
“By contrast, in the Vedic view of things everything
is consciousness. Within consciousness, ideas form
and ideas become material realities in material worlds.
They can do that; thoughts can condense into matter.
The soul is our fundamental consciousness, but we
also have bodies and there’s no distinction
between body and soul. Think of a piano keyboard:
the low notes would be what we perceive as matter,
and the high notes would be what we perceive as mind/spirit/consciousness.
But the piano is one entity. You can’t have
low notes without high notes and still call it a piano,
right? To take it a little further, when you die you
only play on the upper parts of the keyboard, so to
speak. You leave behind the matter and it can be recycled
into other things. Because it’s all consciousness
and it’s all transformable.
“In Western religions we tend to have gods
that stand outside Nature, creating it. Whereas in
Eastern religions, usually Nature is synonymous with
God – Nature itself is the creative process.
In some cultures, ‘soul’ is also synonymous
with ‘body,’ but I personally believe
that our minds are separable from the physical. I’ve
been out of body. I’ve had that experience.
People can relocate the center of their awareness
away from their physical body. They do it all the
time when they daydream.” Elisabet laughed,
“Some people don’t spend much time in
their bodies!
“I have adopted a definition of life known
as ‘autopoiesis.’ Chilean biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela are best known for their
Santiago theory of cognition, that the universe is
a big mind. It’s very much the Vedic view, but
modernized and put into Western terminology. Varela
and Maturana also formulated this concept of autopoiesis
– that a living entity creates itself continually
in relation to its environment. I feel this nicely
distinguishes between mechanism and organism, because
a machine doesn’t invent itself; it requires
an outside inventor. I like to refer to machinery
as ‘alopoietic,’ rather than autopoietic.”
Elisabet offers some interesting ideas on the recently
controversial subject of evolution. “There is
an arrow of evolution, I believe, toward complexity,
and there’s a cycle of evolution that begins
with individuation from some unity. Whether it’s
a Big Bang giving life to lots of little dancing atoms,
or a world egg hatching into lots of creatures, or
a god or goddess creating life from dust, classic
creation stories are about individuation. In biological
evolution, you find that young pioneer species are
very grabby, taking all the resources and territory
they can to establish themselves and knock out their
competition. At some point in a long process, they
learn that collaboration is more efficient than hostile
competition. You don’t find that insight in
Darwinian theory. Darwin took his theory from Thomas
Robert Malthus, leading him to say that everything
in Nature is an endless struggle in scarcity. Even
though Darwin himself observed a lot of cooperation,
he didn’t put that into his theory.
“It was necessary for humanity to go through
this competitive stage – this ‘childhood,’
if you will - so that a new kind of collaboration
or ‘adulthood’ could emerge. We’re
at the stage that the ancient bacteria were after
two billion years of hostilities, when they formed
the nucleated cell as a cooperative thousands of times
bigger than a single bacterium. It was so successful
that we never had to reinvent or re-evolve another
cell in two billion years. That happened at the midpoint
in our past evolution. Now I think that globalization
is exactly that same kind of process, where we find
out that collaborating, even feeding your enemy, is
more efficient, cheaper, and better for everybody
than hostile competition. That is the real flip.
“In my view, the whole universe is a self-creating,
living geometry. I’ve made a 180-degree turn
from believing that consciousness is a late emergent
product of material evolution, to believing that consciousness
is primary and all material evolution follows from
it—which is really the Vedic or Eastern perspective.
It’s a huge shift, and a lot of Western scientists
have made it. You will find us at conferences instead
of graduate schools. I’ve come to think of those
conferences as alternative ‘mini-course’
graduate schools where people vote with their money
to hear the new story, rather than the old story,
of science. And I think that this is amounting to
a quiet revolution.
“In a sense, my own spirituality was really
given back to me. As a child, I just intuitively worshipped
nature. So when I started working with indigenous
people, I had no problem hearing them talk about the
Great Spirit and Nature as deity. That felt very comfortable
to me. Now I like to say that I’m a reverse-missionizing
case. I’ve come to see Nature as a vastly creative
enterprise of self-organizing life.
“Unfortunately, in the creation versus evolution
debate, we’re seeing many scientists become
as fundamentalist as the creationists – digging
in their heels defensively rather than seeing that
the scientific creation story, which is in two basic
parts – physics and biology – is missing
the second half in both cases. Physics says we live
in a non-living universe running down by entropy –
which inspired people to think, ‘No purpose,
no meaning, and get what you can while you can because
it’s all going to pot.’ And then there’s
biology, in which Darwin neglected to talk about cooperation
in his theory.
“The microcosm that exists inside of our own
bodies is awesome – this superbly worked-out
community of cells in which everything contributes
to the whole and everything benefits from the whole,
and unhealthy competition is minimized. We don’t
have, for example, our livers trying to turn our hearts
into another liver. Our nervous system is in service
to the whole, to keep everything functioning cooperatively.
The technologies for extending life right now don’t
understand this aspect of life. The technologies of
genetic engineering don’t fully understand it,
either. These disciplines think in terms of simple
mechanics. Insert here, remove there. They don’t
understand that genomes are constantly cleaning up
damage done to them. We would deteriorate if the human
genome were not constantly on duty cleaning itself
up. There is more going on here than simple mechanics.”
Still, Elisabet has hope for the eventual spiritualization
of science. “I think we will come to a modern
version of Vedic science integrated with Western science
that shows balanced physics and balanced biology and
the sacredness of the whole. Because everything starts
with consciousness, with awareness, with mind. That’s
what people have called ‘God’ throughout
history. So, I believe that we will perceive all nature
as sacred, alive, and participatory with ourselves
as co-creators. Hopefully, we’ll have a little
more humility than to think we’re superior to
everything else that has evolved over billions of
years longer than us, or our own billions of years
of evolution.
“I call myself a creationist evolution biologist.
My view of intelligent design is autopoietic, while
the fundamentalists’ view is alopoietic. But
that difference is not as vast as the divide between
creationists and evolutionists. Intelligent design
integrates creationism and evolution. Evolution is
the creative process.”
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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates
a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where
millions of people already live and thrive. It describes
in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside
down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic
beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first
century full of insights, conversations with recognized
experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable
exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal
flip.
To read more about The Flip
and additional interviews from other luminaries, experts
and bestselling authors, please visit www.theflip.net
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