Bruce Lipton Ph.D.: Embracing the Immaterial Universe

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Embracing the Immaterial Universe

For over four hundred years, Western civilization has chosen science as its source of truths and wisdom about the mysteries of life. Allegorically, we may picture the wisdom of the universe as resembling a large mountain. We scale the mountain as we acquire knowledge. Our drive to reach the top of that mountain is fueled by the notion that with knowledge we may become “masters” of our universe. Conjure the image of the all-knowing guru seated atop the mountain.

Scientists are professional seekers, forging the path up the "mountain of knowledge." Their search takes them into the uncharted unknowns of the universe. With each scientific discovery, humanity gains a better foothold in scaling the mountain. Ascension is paved one scientific discovery at a time. Along its path, science occasionally encounters a fork in the road. Do they take the left turn or the right? When confronted with this dilemma, the direction chosen by science is determined by the consensus of scientists interpreting the acquired facts, as they are understood at the time.

Occasionally, scientists embark in a direction that ultimately leads to an apparent dead end. When that happens, we are faced with two choices: Continue to plod forward with the hope that science will eventually discover a way around the impediment, or return to the fork and reconsider the alternate path. Unfortunately, the more science invests in a particular path, the more difficult it is for science to let go of beliefs that keep it on that path. As historian Arnold Toynbee suggested, the cultural—which includes the scientific—mainstream inevitably clings to fixed ideas and rigid patterns in the face of imposing challenges. And yet from among their ranks arise creative minorities that resolve the threatening challenges with more viable responses. Creative minorities are active agents that transform old, outdated philosophical "truths" into new, life-sustaining cultural beliefs.

From Reductionism to Holism

The path that science is currently navigating has inadvertently brought us to our current moment of global crisis. Since the modern scientific revolution, starting with the publication of Copernicus’s observation in 1543, science has perceived the universe as a physical machine operating on the mechanical principles later defined by Newton. In the Newtonian worldview, the universe is defined by its material reality and its operation understood through reductionism—the process of taking matter apart and studying its bits and pieces. Knowledge of the universe’s parts and their interaction would allow science to predict and control nature. This notion of control is contained within determinism—the belief that with knowledge of something’s parts, we can predict its behavior.

The reductionist approach to understanding the nature of the universe has provided valuable knowledge, enabling us to fly to the moon, transplant artificial hearts, and read the genetic code. However, applying this science to world problems has hastened our apparent demise. It’s a simple fact that society cannot sustain itself by continuing to adhere to its current worldview. So leading-edge research is questioning fundamental assumptions long held as dogma by conventional science.

In contrast to conventional reductionism, the new noetic science is based upon holism, the belief that an understanding of nature and the human experience requires that we transcend the parts to see the whole.