consciousness & science

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METAPHYSICS AND MODERN SCIENCE Part I:CONSCIOUSNESS AND SCIENCE

with WILLIS HARMAN, Ph.D.

[Abridged]THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge andDiscoveryWith Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D: Our topic today is the metaphysical foundations ofscience. With me is Dr. Willis Harman, the President of the Institute of NoeticSciences in Sausalito, California. Dr. Harman is author of numerous books, includingGlobal Mind Change, An Incomplete Guide to the Future, and Higher Creativity. Heis also the editor of an anthology called The Metaphysical Foundations of ModernScience.MISHLOVE: You know, I would imagine that many working scientists today mightfeel a little surprised to think that there are metaphysical foundations to science. Isuspect that many scientists sort of assume that science and metaphysics areunrelated to each other.

HARMAN: I think that's right. I took a lot of science courses, and nobody eversuggested that it was based on some metaphysical assumptions, and I think ingeneral scientists don't think the philosophy of science has much to do with their

activities.

MISHLOVE: But in effect metaphysics is implicit, even if it's not explicit, in science.

HARMAN: It certainly is. You have to start from somewhere. You have to start fromsome assumptions about how you're going to test knowledge, how you're going todecide that now we really know something -- that's what's called epistemology. Andthen you also have underlying assumptions about the very nature of reality --ontologicalassumptions.

MISHLOVE: Most people, and I suppose even scientists, think of this as no morethan common sense.

HARMAN: Well, they think of it as having been settled centuries ago. What wascommon sense in the Middle Ages was different from common sense in the modernworld. But certainly for the last three centuries or so we assume that not only hasscience been operating from the same assumptions, more or less, but furthermorethose are the only appropriate assumptions for science to be based on.

MISHLOVE: Well, I think we ought to look at two things: what are theseassumptions, really, and why is that they seem to stick to science?
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HARMAN: Well, the assumptions are essentially what we usually think of asscientific method. That is, the data that you really trust is the data of the physicalsenses and the data of various instruments that inform the physical senses; and that

essentially everything can be ultimately explained reductionistically in terms offundamental phenomena; that the universe obeys scientific laws, and if you onlyknew what those are you could at least statistically predict, because those laws arenot violated. It's assumptions of that sort which, as you say, are just the everydayassumptions of the working scientist.

MISHLOVE:For example, that there is an objective reality-out there that we canmeasure and know scientifically -- that it's not magical.

HARMAN: Um hm. And that the best way to know it is to stand at a distance and

shoot various kinds of probes in and see what you can learn, and that what thescientist is not supposed to do is in some way identify subjectively with what's beingexamined. Now of course all of those have been challenged quite a bit in the lasthalf century or so. That is, we went through the behaviorist-positivist era in science,and most scientists would say that we've left that behind. But they agree far less onwhere it is we're headed.

MISHLOVE:And I suppose even though one might think of the kind of positivist-behaviorist science we've been describing, where everything is sort of mechanistic

and cut and dried and objective, as being something that we've left behind, it stillremains sort of the orthodoxy of the scientific priesthood, or the upholders of thestatus quo.

HARMAN: Well, I think you sort of have to identify two different revolutions thatare taking place, I think simultaneously. One is arevolutionwithin science--quantum physics, for example; chaos theory. A lot of things are being reassessed inthe light of those frontier areas of science. The other revolution is a revolutionofscience, where for the first time in the history of science a few scientists andphilosophers are saying the time has come when we have to go back and look atthose very basic assumptions, and the fundamental driving thing here is therealization that we have to incorporate consciousness in somehow.

MISHLOVE: Consciousness has always been a problem for science, and one, Ithink, for the most part that's been sort of shoved under the rug.

HARMAN: That's true, and I think it was really quite a landmark conference that washeld at the University of Arizona in 1994, where for the first time, as far as I'm aware,you had this whole spectrum of people, from the ones that are pretty strongly

positivist and reductionist, to the ones that are out in the area of phenomenology andtranspersonal psychology and the very soft areas, and the point was for all of these
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people somehow to learn to talk with one another.

MISHLOVE: I suppose while this conference was an important one, the debate goesback nearly a hundred years.

HARMAN: Debate goes back a long time, and it really was very closely related, ofcourse, to the debate between science and religion. But by the time you get to themiddle of this century, it became pretty clear that science has won and religion haslost and the debate's over. And then that's why it becomes so fascinating to see thatsince then the movement has been in the direction of somehow including spirit intothe scientific world view. Now admittedly, it hasn't gone very far, but you can see thedirection.

MISHLOVE: Well, there are some interesting words that have now come up,challenging sort of the orthodox scientific metaphysics -- spirit, consciousness.These words, which most people can identify with at one level or another, have beenexcluded. And it's striking to me that scientists, who use their own consciousness,and very often their own deep intuitions, to develop their theories, have operated onassumptions that deny the very existence of those intuitions.

HARMAN: Well, we all have a certain amount of ability to shut out certain kinds ofexperience while we're involved with others. But while you raise these questions, it's

in no way denigrating the kind of science that we have and the things that it can do.But we have a science that was dedicated to prediction and to control and todevising manipulative technologies, controlling the physical environment, and forthat purpose it's absolutely superb. But the mistake was made, largely by the non-scientists, I think, in elevating that kind of a world view into the position of a worldview by which you try to guide your life, and in particular guide the powerfulinstitutions of society.

MISHLOVE: I'd like to go back to William James, one of the founders of Americanpsychology, who took the notion of empiricism, which is one of the foundation words

of science, and developed it -- I guess he thought he would carry it as far as it couldbe carried, and he developed what he called radical empiricism. Could you talkabout that?

HARMAN: In fact he played it safe and the material wasn't even published until afterhis death, or at least it wasn't gathered together into a book. But the basic principleof radical empiricism is simply yes, empiricism is how we find out. We try things, weobserve, we gather all the data that we can. But radical empiricism has twoprinciples. One is that you don't leave out anything; especially you don't leave out

anything on the basis that it couldn't happen because our scientific law says itcouldn't happen. And the other part of it is that you include nothing but experience;
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that is, your science is based totally on experience. But it's external and internalexperience.

MISHLOVE: In other words, if conventional science maintains that all of ourknowledge comes through our senses the radical empiricist says, "Yes, but whatdoes it mean to obtain knowledge through the senses? Isn't there a consciousnessin there?"

HARMAN: Yes, I think the radical empiricist would probably say that.

MISHLOVE:And in many ways the current debate is one in which scientists frommany disciplines, from anesthesiology to quantum physics to psychology andcomputer science, are trying to understand exactly what is the role of pure

experience, of consciousness, of intuition, in science.

HARMAN: I think that's exactly right. There really are two fundamental approachesto this, it seems to me. One is to say science must be right because it's been soeffective so far, so therefore there must be ways that we can patch up things throughquantum physics, chaos theory, holographic theory, or whatever; we must be able toget consciousness in. The other approach is to say, "Whoa! If we go back now andlook at the fundamental assumptions" -- and quantum physics helped here.Quantum physics showed that you couldn't leave out the consciousness of the

observer. Well then you'd think then that the rational thing to do at that point is say,"Well, let's go back and reexamine how we started, and how consciousness got leftout." That's of course not what happened, by and large, but what happened was toincrease the faith that somehow if we push quantum physics a little farther, we'll findthe rest of consciousness. But consciousness was left out in the basic foundingassumptions of science.

MISHLOVE:And if we were to go back two or three hundred years ago toNewtonian science, or the writings of Francis Bacon, we'd see a world view in whichthere's the observer and the observed, and the two are separate; the observer doesnot influence or partake of that which is observed, typically.

HARMAN: Well, I think if you go back that far, what you'd find is that this was anexpedient thing to do. It was a way to get started. It was a way to start an empiricalscience, and from a political standpoint it was a way to start an empirical sciencewithout running afoul of the powerful church, because the church had staked out themind and consciousness and spirit as the church's territory. So it made all the sensein the world for science to start that way. It's just that by the time we get to the end ofthe twentieth century it's time to broaden the window.

MISHLOVE: Today we have a notion coming from many fields -- from biology, from


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ecology, even in quantum physics -- the notion of holism -- that the universe is anunseparated whole at its deepest level.

HARMAN: That's right. Now, that brings up a very, very interesting point -- thatscience is all about cause. That's why you have science; you're trying to find theexplanation, the causes, for the phenomena. Now, if really everything is connectedto everything, if there really is only a oneness, everything then affects everything,and everything is the cause of everything in a certain sense, so that the whole ideaof causality has to be revised.

MISHLOVE: And if I as a scientist am to accept that my own consciousness, theway I think, my values, my goals and aspirations -- if these are an intimate part ofthe natural world that I'm attempting to study, then I might begin to think differentlyabout what I'm doing to begin with.

HARMAN: I think for the typical scientist this is a whole succession of shocks. Thatis, the first shock is to realize that there's a bias introduced just in the way youcreate the experiment, even deciding to do it; and then there's a bias thatcomes in in the perception, because we now recognize how powerfully thecontents and the processes of the unconscious mind affect the way we perceive, notjust with our eyes but in every sense. And even though we all know that, it has neverbeen applied to the studying again of how we go about science. We act as though

scientists didn't have an unconscious mind; everybody else does. But then, whenyou pursue the holism even further, then you find there are even more subtle waysthan perception and ESP in which things are connected, and you just can't createan experiment which is isolated, even though of course you can come reasonablyclose, and that makes the kind of science that we have now so extremely useful.

MISHLOVE: In other words, conventional science still offers us what appears to be apretty good approximation of reality.

HARMAN: It's not about to be displaced for scientific work. But it probably is going tobe displaced in terms of a cosmology and a world view that will guide the society.

MISHLOVE: One of the major areas of your own work is to look, I think, attheperennial philosophy, the mystical traditions, the work that's going on intranspersonal psychologyand inpsychic research, and to say, let's see what thesetraditions, where very serious people have been exploring consciousness in manydifferent ways, what do they have to contribute to the scientific endeavor?

HARMAN: Well, if you're going to study consciousness, it only makes sense to turn

to the ones who devoted their lives to that. And so you do pay attention to themystics and the spiritual philosophers and especially to the core esoteric traditions of
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the various spiritual traditions of the earth.

MISHLOVE: And of course they are asking questions themselves that are very

relevant to science, one being the question of epistemology: how do we know whatwe know?

HARMAN: That's right. That is, the best of the mystics in all of the traditionstested their knowledge just as rigorously as scientists test their knowledge.Now, it sounds different because it was in a totally different framework, but theyknew just as well as we know that you can fool yourself with optical illusions, andyou can fool yourself with inner vision. And you have to keep testing, and you'renever sure.

MISHLOVE:You seem to be suggesting that we may be able to develop a newepistemology by looking at some of the spiritual disciplines, intuitive disciplines.

HARMAN: I think that's right, and we tested it out. We gathered together a couple ofgroups of scientists of all sorts and some philosophers, people who were willing totake seriously this question: if we're going to take the challenge of consciousnessseriously, then what kind of an epistemology do we need in order to deal with itwithin the spirit of scientific inquiry? And we put them in a retreat setting. We gotaway from all the telephones and the meetings and the paperwork, and furthermore

we asked them to forget that they were experts and academicians, and to justexplore together as human beings these very, very fundamental questions, thenbringing in later their scientific or philosophical expertise. And we did come up with aset of nine characteristics of an epistemology which doesn't say, "Here's the endresult. Here's the epistemology." It does say that as we finally agree upon anepistemology in the scientific community -- a certain set of rules of evidence, as itwere -- as we finally agree on that, it will probably have these nine characteristics.

MISHLOVE: Well, I certainly won't ask you to enumerate each of the nine

characteristics now.

HARMAN: The first one is the radical empiricism that you mentioned.

MISHLOVE: I would imagine that the thrust of all of this is to say that there is alegitimacy to exploring the universe by using our own consciousness, our own directawareness of the universe, as our tool.

HARMAN: That's a part of it. That is one of the characteristics -- that it's going to payprimary attention to subjective experience, subjectively experienced data, and it's

going to test that, and it's going to have some consensus about how you test that.But that's definitely a part of the picture. And that leads to something else -- well, it


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leads to a number of things. It leads to realizing that any models or equations ormetaphors that we use -- and that's what science is, is a collection of those things --but whatever that collection is, it has to always be tentative, and it has to always be

specific to a certain purpose. You use one metaphor for consciousness for onepurpose, and you use another metaphor for another purpose. But let me go on just aminute, if I may, because one of the other characteristics becomes a real stickingpoint, and that is that once you recognize the power of the unconscious to affect ourperceptions, then you recognize that as the scientist continues to explore further andfurther, lo and behold, the scientist is going to change, because he or she also isexploring their own inner working, and so one of the characteristics of theepistemology is that it won't stand still. As the scientific culture changes, theconsensus about the epistemology is going to change.

MISHLOVE: In other words, just as computers and telescopes, the tools of science,as they become more and more refined for further use, as we considerconsciousness itself a scientific tool, it will change, it will evolve.

HARMAN: That's right. Human beings will become more and more refined, and thenthat will change the way we do things. But what that means, of course, is in theeducation of a science, that the personal transformation is very definitely a part ofthe education, not something that you can do in your off hours somewhere.

MISHLOVE: ... Epistemology is a tough one. It means: how do we know what wethink we know? And ontology, another branch of philosophy, asks the question: whatis it that is ultimately real?

HARMAN: Yes; what are your assumptions about ultimate reality? And of course theassumptions of the Middle Ages were one thing, and the assumptions of thepresent-day scientist are quite different, and the assumptions of science by andlarge -- and there are always exceptions to these fine generalizations -- but theassumption by and large is that the universe follows certain regularities which can bestudied, and that ultimately a nomothetic science -- there's another one;nomothetic, that is,a science about laws -- will ultimately completely describe theuniverse and all the creatures in it. Whereas the emerging point of view, I think, isthat that has to be tempered -- that scientific laws hold under certain conditions, oneof the conditions being that consciousness is not intervening somehow in theexperiment.

MISHLOVE: Well, the traditional scientific ontology is I guess what one might callmaterialism -- monistic materialism. Everything is made out of particles of matter, or

particles of matter and energy. Now I think we're looking at a larger view, in which

we say yes of course, matter exists, particles exist, but there are other levels. Thereare in fact several levels of consciousness, and levels of culture, and levels of


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biological systems, that cannot be reduced to the interactions of billiard-ball-likeparticles.

HARMAN: Yes, I don't want us to caricature the scientists. They aren't necessarilyone hundred percent pure materialists. Scientific law is something real, but it's notmaterial. So there is a certain amount of idealist philosophy that comes into sciencetoo. But there has not been clear thinking about it on the part of the scientists, andthere hasn't been clear thinking about it on the part of the philosophers either, itseems to me, because they've gone off and gotten involved with other subjects, andthey haven't had much wise to say about this recently. So there is an opening up tothe possibility, let's say, of multiple vantage points. You can look at the world in itsphysical forms and you can learn certain things. You can look at the world taking aspart of reality biological organisms, and they have certain characteristics that youcan't reduce to simple physical things. And then you can look at the world from thestandpoint of, say, humanistic studies, and then consciousness comes in in a waythat it didn't before. Then you can look at the world in a mystical-spiritual way, andthen some new elements come in. And no one of those denies the rest. They allhave a certain validity.

MISHLOVE: I know you are particularly interested in the field that's beencalledtranspersonal psychology, which is the attempt to take the mystical-spiritualapproach to life and translate it, not into a religious metaphor, but into a

psychological understanding.

HARMAN: That's only one of many labels I have, but we talk in terms of that one.Yes, it seems to me that that's an end of the spectrum that's been neglected, andthat we'd better pay attention to it. As you may know, there's just been a flurry ofconferences on science and consciousness recently, and I presume that they will goon, a number of them each year, and they reflect the fact that we have come to thepoint in history where we have to raise this question seriously.

MISHLOVE: Well, it's an important time to do it. I think the irony is that if we go backin history just a few decades, consciousness was a taboo word in science. Peoplewould be afraid of losing their research grants or not getting tenure if they spoke toovociferously about the mind.

HARMAN: Well, the conscious awareness of the scientist was of course recognizedas something that was there. But it was assumed that some day we will have anexplanation for that in terms of the processes within the central nervous system orsomewhere. And in fact you can still hear scientific papers on occasion that are onthe subject of where do we locate consciousness in the human body. I think it will

turn out to be a nonsense question.
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MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose it's fair to say that the mainstream of the scientificcommunity still sort of holds the faith that the neurological sciences will ultimately

provide us the foundation of consciousness.

HARMAN: Well, again, there is an evolution taking place. Some years ago the SloanFoundation put up a good big sum of money to develop what came to be known asthe neurosciences, which didn't exist; it was a lot of separate disciplines that werebrought together. And then later on they did the same thing with regard to whatcame to be called the cognitive sciences. And I think now it's time for somefoundation to come forth and say, "We'll put up some money to developconsciousness research as a valid, legitimate field of inquiry," which it has not been,as you observed.

MISHLOVE: So the day may come when the intuitive sciences will take their placeside by side with the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences.

HARMAN: Without feeling ashamed.

MISHLOVE: Well, Willis, it's been a pleasure pursuing this exploration with you. Itstrikes me that what you're doing is waving a banner for people to say, look what'sgoing on. The age is changing. The old assumptions are dying, and we have toallow all of the serious thinkers, and maybe even some of the not so serious thinkers

in our society, in on the discussion, because reality itself is evolving in a way, orcertainly our understanding of the fundamentals of reality are evolving.

HARMAN: I think that's right, and so far of course we've only talked about embodiedconsciousness.

MISHLOVE: Uh huh. Well, we'll have another conversation and look at disembodiedconsciousness as well. Willis Harman, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much forbeing with me.

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METAPHYSICS AND MODERN SCIENCE Part II:CONSCIOUSNESS BEYOND DEATH

with WILLIS HARMAN, Ph.D.[Abridged]

THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge OfKnowledge and DiscoveryWith Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Go to Part 1

JEFFREYMISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove.This is Part 2 of our two-part series on the metaphysical foundationsof science. With me is Dr. Willis Harman, President of the Institute ofNoetic Sciences in Sausalito, California. Dr. Harman is author of severalbooks, including Global Mind Change, An Incomplete Guide to theFuture, and Higher Creativity. He is also the editor of an anthologycalled The New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

MISHLOVE: In our previous interview, in Part 1 of this two-part series,we looked at the philosophical aspects of the metaphysical foundationsof science. Specifically we looked at questions like epistemology -- howdo we know what we think we know? -- and ontology, which is, what isthe nature of absolute reality? And we talked about the importance ofdirect conscious awareness in the scientific process, or the importanceof intuition. In this interview we're going to focus in on some of theextraordinary evidence that suggests that consciousness is much, muchlarger than it's conventionally assumed to be, and in particular we'll lookat the kind of evidence that has come from over a hundred years of

research into the question of the survival of the self after physical death.So with that lengthy introduction to the topic, it might be useful to pointout that while in modern culture the idea that our consciousnesssurvives deathis sort of strange and maybe even a little spooky, scaryto people, at one time this was considered simply the way it was.

HARMAN: Well, it certainly was, of course, in almost every societyexcept modern Western society. But of course this has a long history.First of all, the thing that's pushing consciousness into the scene, I think,

these days is not that particular question, but just the fact that really it'snot just consciousness as awareness, but consciousness as
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intention and volition, that aspect of consciousness. Because ifconsciousness can be cause in some basic sense, well, then thatcauses us to revise everything we've been thinking about science. But

then, as you begin to pursue this further and further, and you think aboutother levels of consciousness and so on, sooner or later you run intonear-death experiences and other out-of-body experiences, and thevarious kinds of indications that consciousness is not necessarilyembodied. And that of course revives the question of the nature of deathand after death. But there's really been a century and a half or so ofresearch relating to this. The early hypnosis research was some of it.But there was a peak of activity around the end of the nineteenth century-- partly in England, partly here, to some extent in India -- where anattempt was made to really tackle this question. As a matter of fact,Stanford University was in the eyes of its founders -- it was their wishthat Stanford University should be the foremost university in the world inthe study of the survival of consciousness after death.

MISHLOVE: The whole scientific community kind of turned to thisquestion in the wake of a huge wave of popular interest in Spiritualism.

HARMAN: That's true. In the early half and the middle of the nineteenthcentury there was a lot of interest in spiritualism and mediumship and

what we now call channeling.

MISHLOVE: Leading intellects of the nineteenth century believed thatscience could answer the question of do we survive bodily death.

HARMAN: Yes. And at that time the approach was a fairly direct one --that is, through mediumship to try to establish communication linksbetween those who are now living and those who have recently died, ormaybe not so recently. And of course this had a lot of frustrationsassociated with it, because whatever the medium has to say has kind ofbubbled up through the medium's own unconscious mind, so you don'treally know what you have. And there were very strenuous attempts totry to pin this down, reduce that effect as much as possible. But evenwith that faulty kind of evidence, there were lots and lots of instanceswhere information seemed to appear that, as far as anyone could tell,was only known to the dead person.

MISHLOVE: I know I had occasion to read a report by the SmithsonianInstitution, published in 1903, surveying the last fifty years of research

on survival, and they summarized the work and concluded that, well, theresearchers haven't proven survival, but surely they have come up with


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evidence for telepathy and thought transference and extrasensoryperception that could not be denied.

HARMAN: That was of course part of what was going on. And so one ofthe approaches, then, which was really started by Professor CooveratStanford University and then later picked up by Dr. Rhine at Duke, wasto try to devise some experimental approaches so that you coulddemonstrate that consciousness could do things that could not beexplained in any physical way, or could be instrumental in phenomenathat couldn't be understood without invoking some new kind of cause --what sometimes is called psi, a sort of general-purpose word forphenomena of this sort that we don't seem to understand.

MISHLOVE: I'd like to just step back for a moment, because in thebeginning of our talk you mentioned briefly the idea of causation and willand intention, and how, especially in the nineteenth century, thescientific view was that the universe operated like a clockworkmechanism -- that there was no room for purpose, for free will, at all.

And the idea that consciousness could exist independently of the body,and that it might have some kind of an intentional influence on physicalsystems, couldn't have been more antithetical to the scientific

mainstream view.

HARMAN: Or even if it were embodied -- that is, the question wasusually posed as a tension between free will on the one hand anddeterminism on the other. And it seemed to be a very real problem, andlike the mind-body problem and the science-versus-spirit problem, agreat deal of effort was put into them. I think now that we're at the pointof reexamining the metaphysical assumptions we see that those are allproblems which were caused by the assumptions that science started

with, and in that sense they're not such real problems after all.

MISHLOVE: But when we talk about the term metaphysics -- that whichis above or beyond physics itself -- I suppose one of the deepestquestions of all, and one that philosophers love to dodge -- they don'teven consider it a metaphysical question -- is do we survive death. Iknow this is something that you've looked at closely.

HARMAN: Well, certainly the conventional opinion in the modern worldis of course not; what an absurd thing to ask about.


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MISHLOVE: In fact one would consider it wish fulfillment, a fantasy.

HARMAN: That's right. And even those who adopt a religion in which

that's somehow part of the belief system still have quite an ambivalenceabout it, because in the scientific world view it seems such an absurdity.But nevertheless psi research has gone on, and the results are stillquestionable, erratic, but nevertheless there are positive results there.But more convincing to a lot of people are the macrophenomena, thekinds of phenomena that you don't have to search in the statistics to findthem. They come up and hit you in the head, like poltergeists andhaunting of houses, and various kinds of psychokinetic phenomena thatseem to have appeared.

MISHLOVE: Psychokinesis means mind over matter. I suppose if welook at the range of phenomena that falls under that category of psiresearch or psychical research, or a term I dislike, parapsychology,because it doesn't seem to be para to me at all --

HARMAN: If you don't like it, why say it?

MISHLOVE: I want to say it just to say that I think this field ought to beconsidered regular psychology. Psychology means the study of the soul,or psyche. But we were talking, Willis, in Part 1 of this interview, aboutthe role of consciousness itself in the research process. And I think thecase in point of looking at survival is interesting, because the veryresearchers who devoted their lives to posing and answering thequestion, "Do we survive death?" -- well, they ultimately died, andthere's some evidence to suggest that even after their death theyattempted to help provide answers to that question.

HARMAN: Yes, that's worth reviewing, and it was true of a number of

them, but let's take the case of F.W.H. Myers, since that's the most clearcase.

MISHLOVE: The author of a wonderful, very complete volume calledHuman Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.

HARMAN: Absolutely -- laid out the terrain for a science ofconsciousness which we haven't even begun to explore yet, and thebook was published in 1903. Myers had been -- he was a scholar at

Cambridge, a Classics scholar, actually.


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MISHLOVE: Meaning Greek and Latin.

HARMAN: Yes. So this other work was somewhat of a sideline, but

nevertheless he clearly considered it to be his most important work, andit's a magnificent two-volume work that he produced. But then, as youpointed out, as with all mortals, he died. But before he did, he had madea sort of semi-facetious promise to his colleagues that they were havingso much trouble with this matter of the distortion of communicationsthrough the mediums, through the women -- mostly women -- who weredoing the channeling, and it was so frustrating. Essentially he said,"When I die I will cook up an experiment that will leave you in no doubtabout the reality of survival." Well, he died in 1903. Not much happeneduntil another ten years or so. And then mediums in several places inthree different continents began to receive what seemed to be fragmentsof messages which contained fragments of Classical quotations, andthey didn't seem to make any sense at all, except that it was the customof the time, among those who were involved with this kind of inquiry, tosend copies of everything to the Society for Psychical Research inLondon, which Myers had had a hand in forming, by the way. And sothese all gathered together in London, and they fit together like pieces ofa jigsaw puzzle, and they seemed to -- well, it was a message thatpuported to come from Myers, in which he was clearly identifying himself

with a Classical quotation and identifying the reality of the phenomenon,in view of the fact that these transmissions seemed to come to India andthe United States and England, and it wasn't until they were all broughttogether that they made the kind of sense that they obviously made inwhatever mind it was that transmitted them.

MISHLOVE: In other words, a medium in India, a medium in England, amedium in the United States simultaneously, independently, without anyknowledge of the others, receiving messages purporting to come from

an entity, a spirit, who called himself Myers, and these messagescontained allusions to ancient Greek and Latin, of which Myers himselfhad been an expert, and they only made sense when they were kind of

put together.

HARMAN: That's exactly right.

MISHLOVE:Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

HARMAN: So it was fairly convincing, and at the time there were many

who were convinced that here at last we have really nailed this down;now there's no question about the phenomenon. Of course that was


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very rapidly forgotten, so that the cross-correspondences, as they werecalled, they just disappeared into history. They were published, ofcourse.

MISHLOVE: They did disappear, but my understanding is they actuallywent on for about thirty years.

HARMAN: Yes, it was a long time.

MISHLOVE:And involved some thousand communications, coming notjust from Myers, but from some of the other deceased members of thePsychical Research Society.

HARMAN: Yes. So it was impressive to those impressed, and it wasnonsense to those who were not.

MISHLOVE: Well, you had to be something of a Classical scholaryourself to understand many of the subtleties.

HARMAN: You had to be interested enough to do a lot of reading in the-- you only became impressed when you looked into the details.

MISHLOVE: If you wanted to.

HARMAN: It didn't make a big dent with regard to the attitudes of thescientific community, because they were in the process of movingtoward what we now know as the behaviorist era and the positivist era,and so on. But we haven't finished with Myers yet, because in the late1920s an automatic writer -- a person who is a medium but instead ofthe message coming through an oral communication it came in an urgeto write, and her hand would write things that she was not consciouslyaware of at all. She never knew, with many of these writings, what had

been written until the whole thing was assembled, because she had anassistant who would exchange pieces of paper for her, and she justwent on.

MISHLOVE: Automatic writing.

HARMAN: Automatic writing. And this turned out to be scripts for twoseparate books, Beyond Human Personality, and another one whosename I forget at the moment. But both of them purported to be accounts

of the explorations of Frederick Myers since the time of his death somequarter of a century earlier. And he went on to explain how it is. And the


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important thing about these particular books is not just them bythemselves, because you could treat them as any other kind of fiction.But what he had to say checks pretty well with a lot of other mediumistic

communication; it checks pretty well with various near-deathexperiences; it checks very well with various kinds of other spiritualtraditions; it checks pretty well with some of the far-out psychedelicexperiences that various people had. So we really have a tremendousamount of anecdotal data that converges on some sort of a picture ofwhat it is that happens when we die.

MISHLOVE: In other words, the old adage that nobody has died andthen come back to tell us about it simply may not be true.

HARMAN: That's exactly right. Now of course people do tend to get aparticular picture of what this experience is like, and I think of itsomewhat as in the days when Africa was the dark continent, and oneexplorer goes to the Sahara Desert, and another one goes to the tropicaljungle, and another one lands somewhere else, and then they all maketheir reports, and each one is convinced that he's seen Africa. Well, ofcourse Africa is all of those things, and it's a similar sort of thing here --that what happens to you immediately after death is very much afunction of what you expect to happen, apparently; very much a function

of what you want very much to happen, perhaps.

MISHLOVE: In other words, you live in a world populated by your ownthoughts.

HARMAN: Well, and by other people that you bring into your ownthoughts, perhaps.

MISHLOVE: No different than this world.

HARMAN: That's right. But then, as time goes on, you recognize -- Ihave to say apparently and purportedly and all those kind of guardingwords, but it seems that the picture is something like this, that as timegoes on -- and it's not time in our physical sense, but anyway, thingshappen in sequence. And you recognize that your learning is tocontinue; you're not to stay there and play in whatever kind of heavenyou've created, but to move on, to learn more and more -- or, if you wantthat kind of terminology, to go to higher and higher levels of awarenessor levels or consciousness, where you become more and more part of

the unified, the oneness, the whole -- well, become aware of being that;you are that all the time. I think that's the most important point that


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comes out of all of this, is that you don't go somewhere when you die.You just remember where you have always been, and you are lessdistracted by the physical body because you don't have the live one

anymore.

MISHLOVE: You join that larger part of yourself that's sometimes calledthe higher self.

HARMAN: Well, it isn't even joining it, because you're already joined.There's nothing to do about it. You just become aware. And somepeople do while they're still living, of course, in this body, temporarilybecome aware of some of these other levels. And of course we'vetended in modern society to sneer at that as some kind of medievalmysticism, and we don't have to pay much attention to it, until the lastthirty years or so, and then more and more people have been gettinginterested in the traditions in which that sort of experience is soughtafter.

MISHLOVE:And there's an enormous literature developing on near-death experience, and channeling, even electronic communication withthe deceased.

HARMAN: Well, there always has been a fascination with the physicalmanifestations, whether it was table rapping or slate writing, wherewriting seems to appear on a slate, even though there's no one aroundto move the chalk. And there have been many, many suchmanifestations; I'm kind of groping for which one would be the mostinteresting one to talk about.

MISHLOVE: Well, let's step back for a moment, Willis, and let's just takeanother look philosophically at what we've just discussed. How does this

kind of material impact our scientific thinking?

HARMAN: Well, we're going to include consciousness in science. I thinkthe die is cast. We're going to do it somehow. Now, one way ofapproaching that is to say, "Well, let's start out with the most narrow,specific definition of consciousness we can, namely, consciousawareness. Let's see what we can learn about that."

MISHLOVE: Some scientists say let's just see if we can explain visualperception. That alone is hard enough.

HARMAN: Now, the other approach is to go clear the other way and


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say, look, the big advance in biology was Darwin; we all agree with that.Now Darwin could have studied finches in the Galapagos all of his life,but he didn't. He said, "What we need is a framework in which we can

put what I've observed here, and what others have reported somewhereelse, and so on; we can somehow put all of that in the same framework."Now according to this second point of view, that'swhat we need in theconsciousness research area, is some kind of framework in which wecan put conscious awareness, we can put intention and volition, we canput creativity and intuition, we can put life after death, we can put psi,and so on and on. Not that we know all about all of these things; not thatwe've proven in some sense that they all exist every time they'rereported; but that there seems to be enough of that kind of data that weseem to need a framework to include it all. And that's where you getdriven to the metaphysical assumptions and their reexamination.

MISHLOVE: Sure. So the question is, do we want to first explainordinary conscious awareness, and then look at the so-called

paranormal? I don't like the "para"-normal part of it, because my ownprejudice -- if I can interject myself a little bit into this interview -- is, howcan we explain normal consciousness if we don't take into account allthe data?

HARMAN: Well, there are two points of view, and they're bothlegitimate. Because a lot of the advances in science were made bysaying let's start with the simple, elementary phenomena first, and go onfrom there. But a few, like evolutionary theory, were made the other way.So they're both valid points of view, and they produce something.

MISHLOVE: But you seem to be suggesting that at least it ought to belegitimate for some people to try and look at all the data.

HARMAN: Yes, without necessarily losing tenure or losing all reputationfor good sense. And of course that is going on, but mainly it's not goingon in the major research universities. Mainly it's going on with poor --poor in the sense of no money -- researchers who gather together andgive one another comfort and inspiration. But some very interestingthings are going on, and some of it is in this area of physicalphenomena. You can imagine -- see, one of the things that seems tohave happened is that people like -- well, I mentioned Thomas Edisonfor one, or Dr. Raudive in Latvia for another, who nobody has ever heardof except in this small group, but he was one of the foremost of the

researchers who was recently trying to establish these kinds ofcommunications.


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MISHLOVE: Electrical voice of the deceased.

HARMAN: I'm getting to that. It had to do with -- let's just imagine for themoment that there are some persons alive -- persons, entities, what dowe call them?

MISHLOVE: Spirits.

HARMAN: Something's alive, in a certain sense -- conscious anyway.And they're saying, "You know, we've been trying for decades to getthese knuckleheads to get their beliefs straight about death, and theyjust don't get it." And then after World War II the German-invented taperecorder came along, and it wasn't very many years after that before

what seemed to be voices began to appear on tape recorders that werepresumably just turned on, but just receiving noise. And then someinterest developed in that in Europe, not so much in the United States,and one of the researchers was this Dr. Raudive, who then himself diedbut seemed to retain his interest in this. So now we seem to have acollaborative effort, if you can put it this way. You know, in most circles Iwould feel a little bit foolish talking about this so glibly, but again, we'llcover ourselves by saying it seems to have happened.

MISHLOVE: Well, we're almost out of time, so unfortunately we can'tget into more of the details. But you seem to be saying that just asMyers seemed to have collaborated from the other side, it's happeningtoday.

HARMAN: That's right, and messages and pictures seem to be comingthrough, on audio tapes, videotapes, television screens, computer disks.You know, there's no way you can make sense out that with our ordinaryway of looking at things, no way at all.

MISHLOVE:And it's substantial enough that a scholar such as yourself-- and I will add, for purposes of your credibility here, a former professor,a professor emeritus of engineering at Stanford University, and emeritusRegent of the University of California -- you've inquired into this areaand believe that we ought to take it quite seriously -- that this isn't justflim-flam.

HARMAN: I think we will be taking it seriously, because it's not goingaway. I know my own feelings when I first ran into it, and they were very

strange feelings down in the solar plexus area, and they were very


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uncomfortable.

MISHLOVE: Well, Willis Harman, I want to applaud you for yourcourage in being willing to discuss these areas that get pushed asideover and over and over again, and suggesting that maybe those of uswho are looking seriously at consciousness need to look at this. Thanksso much for being with me.

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