Nuclear threats. The climate crisis. The Ukraine War. Civil War. Undrinkable water. Economic uncertainty. Mass migrations.

Are we living in a dark age? Journalist and activist Jane Jacobs thought so, and her prescient book Dark Age Ahead made that argument when it came out in 2004.

I recently ran across an item in The Week which seems to make a strong case that what we’re now experiencing is exactly that:

A multi-decade analysis of 150,000 pop songs showed that uses of the word 'love' in top 100 songs declined by 50% between 1965 and 2015 while the incidence of 'hate' and other negative terms rose sharply.

You might find yourself deeply troubled by any or all of these trends. If that’s the case, then congratulations: you’re a normal, thinking, feeling human being. The involuntary angst that goes along with thinking about such matters thrives in the subterranean reaches of our consciousness and, ultimately, the associated darkness is hard to avoid.

Beyond Outrage

Recently, I found myself thinking about a bumper sticker I saw years ago when “statement” bumper stickers were still in vogue: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

Outrage, of course, can only take us so far. But if anyone is not concerned about the state of the planet, they’re probably deep in denial. On the other hand, being awake and aware of the full spectrum of the human condition right now might seem like a mixed blessing.

You may be wondering: What do I do with these feelings of anger, depression, outrage, despair, garden-variety sorrow, and any number of other deep emotional reactions to the state of the world? This is indeed a challenge.

First off, give yourself a pat on the back for being dialed in to a very unusual time in history, a special time in more ways than one, although you might find yourself wishing it wasn’t so special. But we’re all here now and struggling and feeling deeply about the state of the world. Thinking about how it will affect us, our families, and our friends is a normal and natural response.

You might also be asking yourself lots of questions and struggling to find answers, often without success. What might come bubbling up as Question Number One is:

• What do I need to do with this awareness?
• How should I respond and what are the options?
• How do I maintain and engage this awareness in the world around me to possibly make things a little better?

I wish I could offer a simple answer. There’s really no “proper” response to being an alive and awake human being at this extraordinary existential crossroads in time.

But there are definitely choices to be made. (Pesky things, choices.) And each of us has to figure how to best navigate through it all.

Choices in an Unusual Time

What I can do is lay out some choices. The great cultural historian William Irwin Thompson once said that, in times of civilizational turmoil and redefinition, retreating is a time-honored response. Such is the time we’re living in now.

Living “off the grid” is always an option. What that means first and foremost is disconnecting from consumer culture and the power that technology gives to unthinking, unfeeling corporations over the most minute aspects of our lives while we try to embrace a commitment to a better quality of life amid the chaos.

You might be feeling a tug towards something like this which could take the form of moving into the country, traveling, or even being a digital nomad in your day job as both of my daughters have done at different times in their lives.

The opposite of this and yet another option is full-on engagement.

In my own case, I decided that one thing I needed to do was look around at the planetary mess and select some small piece of work that needed to be done to try and move the needle a bit. My own term for this is micro-activism, possibly analogous to just lending a hand as you might see in news footage of neighbors helping out after a natural disaster strikes.

There’s no shortage of ways to do this and no shortage of work to be done. That’s something you may or may not feel called to do but, if you do, just go for it without holding back.

Sometimes this kind of work can feel hopelessly Sisyphean but so what?

Balancing Activism and “Smelling the Roses”

But what about the rest of our lives amid this turmoil?

I try to balance this work with as much self-care as I can muster. For me that’s some combination of ongoing practices such as meditation, Tai chi, what the Dutch call “Niksen” (doing nothing), and immersion in nature.

There’s a balance to be struck between activism and the need to recharge our batteries. When that balance gets out of whack (which can easily happen), then things stop flowing.

A somewhat applicable analogy is what parents are told by flight crews when a plane runs into trouble: use the oxygen mask on yourself first or you won’t be able to help your child or anyone else.

But there’s a third part which I haven’t talked about in previous blogs. And that’s what back in the day used to be called “smelling the roses,” just trying to enjoy life.

If you have a certain mindset, you might feel an unrelenting pressure to try to contribute to what cultural historian Morris Berman has called “the re-enchantment of the world.” But there’s nothing written in stone that says, while doing this, we have to abandon the pleasures and enjoyments of our own lives.

This can be a difficult area not just for activists but for anyone of a caring disposition. So, my message here is a simple one:

Yes, it’s ok to enjoy the best things of your life even as the world seems to be changing before your eyes beyond all recognition.

And yes, that can feel like a contradiction at times, but the notion of balancing is really the key.

The exquisite balance is between personal enjoyment, commitment to healing the planet, and spiritual growth. It's strictly a personal juggling act, the end point of which, has to feel right for you.

I wanted to share some things that I’ve been pondering lately. So here goes (in no particular order):

Recent Ponderings

Are traditional and natural medicine now on a collision course?

A few decades ago, I was buoyed up and hopeful about the prospect of allopathic medicine nicely integrating with naturopathic medicine. There was great progress on what was called CAM or complementary and alternative medicine.

This was all about traditional medicine being more open to a wide variety of natural treatments and cooperation between the two approaches. It was happening in many areas, and it was a truly positive development.

This integration included paying more attention to the role of the food we eat and how it affects health; the use of supplements that provided gentler alternatives to the potency of drugs; and the use of tai chi, yoga, and energetic healing for preventive purposes, and also to complement healing.

I was hopeful that this process might continue in the years after 2010 to the present. But something happened. I’m sad to report that I no longer think this is possible.

Big Pharma’s blatant takeover of our now clearly for-profit medical system has shut the door to any such peaceful co-existence. This is largely because, sadly, Pharma is waging all-out information warfare on many alternative practices.

Doctor Bezos

You may have heard the news that Amazon is getting into the healthcare business. I can hardly wait.

I wonder if they will allow their doctors and nurses to have bathroom breaks?

Lucid in Ecstasy?

The great French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote in his notebooks that he wanted to be “lucid in ecstasy.” Certainly a pleasant enough thought.

However, I would be happy to settle for just being fully and completely lucid, i.e. having the clarity of mind to see more deeply into whatever situations life presents through meditation and other approaches.

Perchance to Dream

I had a rather amazing dream 10 or 11 years ago. I only recall the vague outlines of it now, and even that, somewhat hazily. In the dream, I was paging through a book. Each page of the book had perfectly composed writing. I was able to read page after page although the actual subject matter I now can’t recall.

Upon waking, I remember being absolutely sure I had never seen the writing before. It was complex, original, and beautifully crafted writing but not mine. That day, I tried as hard as I could to figure out how my mind could even come up with such a thing. Was it even possible?

I finally came up with only two possibilities to explain it. Either my mind actually had composed the completed pages of writing during the dream (which was, of course, amazing enough if true). Or, alternatively, my (mind, spirit, higher self, pick one) had somehow accessed this material some from another realm of existence (equally amazing).

A Change of Heart

I used to not believe in evil as a force or a phenomenon. It was so “un-modern.” I thought of it as somewhat antiquated and that it fostered dualism (it does in a way, but that’s a longer discussion). However, later in my life, and to my own surprise, I changed my thinking. The problem is that we don’t always recognize evil as such. Not doing so can serve to give it a free pass.

The other problem is that the word itself is loaded with associations and that means using the term “evil” can become a verbal hand grenade. In our culture, we have largely tended to avoid using it.

That said, I think evil can masquerade as many things and manifest in very subtle ways. It’s worth reflecting on how all of the bad things that we experience in our lives and in society, politically, socially, and culturally, first appear to us as something good. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be disposed in any way to accept them.

As an example of this, one of the greatest evils we’re facing right now is a nihilistic philosophy called transhumanism that seeks to subordinate the human spirit to technology and machines.

R. D Laing, We Miss You

R.D. Laing was a brilliant Scottish psychiatrist who suggested that war is a form of mass psychosis. Back in the day, he wrote that “Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. Normal men have killed 100 million of their fellow men in the past 50 years.”

Commenting on Laing’s work and furthering this line of thinking, another observer, clinical psychologist Frank MacHovec wrote a fascinating blog on this subject arguing that wartime behavior meets current diagnostic criteria for a severe mental disorder.

Worth pondering.

Things are getting a little crazy out there to say the least. Politically, culturally, and spiritually, the world situation we’ve been seeing over the last few years is almost beyond description. Depressing at times? Yes. Puzzling? For sure.

Why is this massive disruption to the planet and our own lives happening and why now? I will leave any thoughts I have about that for another blog perhaps. For now, the challenge seems to be to engage in what sometimes feels like a desperate attempt to maintain some kind of equilibrium in a “world gone wrong” to quote the title of a Bob Dylan song. So here are a few ideas I’ve been mulling over and some practices I find useful and wanted to share. I hope they’re helpful:

• Stay out of fear.

  Job 1 is to not get overwhelmed by fear and anxiety or both. One of the downsides of social media and “always on” communications is the steady stream of horrific and troubling news that comes pouring in on our phones and computers. It’s hard to get away from it. But this kind of information overload can paint an inaccurate picture of what’s happening in world events because the mainstream media tends to be geared towards focusing on the negative and ignoring reporting on positive changes if they happen to threaten the status quo.

  We all need time to process and if you’re hit with one bad news bomb after another in rapid succession, that can be hard on the psyche. While it’s good to be alert to the latest supply chain disruptions, COVID subvariants, water supply crises, or climate disasters, there’s a balance to be struck. Only you can decide how much is too much. If you need a break, just take it. Consider a “media diet” for a week, i.e. drastically curtailing TV and computer news feeds and see how that feels. Also consider subscribing to some positive email alerts from publications that provide a more positive outlook on things such as Yes magazine or the Utne Reader.

• Meditate.

• Kill your television.

  I haven’t actually seen that bumper sticker around for some time. Back in the day, Jerry Mander wrote a book called Four Argument for the Elimination of Television. Then of course, media viewing and “watching TV” was vastly different from now. And you could simply and easily switch “the idiot box” off or just not turn on to begin with. But some things never change: the amount of content on broadcast television that’s negative, mind numbing, violent, or just plain surreal is even worse than it was decades ago. Switching it off one way or another can be an act of liberation and affirmation.

  Then of course there’s streaming entertainment. As a former media analyst, I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the underlying messaging in Hollywood movies along with the massive video production coming from Netflix, Amazon, and others. Occasionally, they come up with excellent fare. But I’ve noticed that over the last few years, movies have become increasingly dark and violence-prone. As a simple exercise, make a quick note of how many war-themed movies are now being promoted by these New Media houses. It’s also interesting to observe the correlation between the high number of war movies now being promoted when the world is poised for wars and their escalation.

• Get curious.

  All of the major spiritual traditions have important things to say about the time we’re now living in even though some of that might be classified as esoteric knowledge. I was amazed to discover this as part of a research project I did with The Emergence Project back in 2009. Getting a deeper understanding of the notion of world ages and what some call deep history can help provide a broader perspective on the huge changes and upheaval we’re experiencing on the planet at this time. The work of Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy is a helpful resource. And the spiritual teacher Yogananda has an organization that studies world ages and the existential puzzle of whether or not we’re living in the Vedic dark age called the Kali Yuga. But it’s also helpful to keep in mind the balancing of Yin and Yang: even though things appear to be falling apart and seriously awry, we’re still living in a somewhat magical time with many amazing positive changes occurring behind the scenes.

• Don’t fall for the war narrative.

  I recently Googled “Is war a good thing?” I was curious to see what results I might get. I couldn’t have been more surprised to see what Google’s Q&A coughed up: “As war leads to larger societies, it also leads to greater pacification and greater wealth. (Nice Google.) The drumbeat towards war coming from various governments, including the US, is getting louder. But war is one of the greatest causes of human suffering. That the global community has not learned to avoid them after two horrendous world wars (including the supposed “war to end all wars”, WWI)  is both sad and profoundly disappointing. 

  The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing once described the advent of war as a communicable psychological phenomenon that’s passed from one person to the next as a purely irrational tribal response and contagion. We think we’re rational creatures until we’re not. I believe it because I see no other explanation for the otherwise smart and thoughtful people I know who have suddenly become comfortable with the “We must win at all costs” chimera. It seems important to ask: how can anyone ever be comfortable with that level of human suffering? One thing to keep in mind is that those who enthusiastically advocate for war and try to convince the populace of its necessity are often the ones who are best insulated from its horrific effects. Funny how that works.

  It’s important to try to resist its faux-patriotic lure. It’s important to try to break the chain of strong social conditioning towards state-sanctioned violence in the hope of breaking this seemingly endless cycle of hate and destruction in humanity’s history evolution. I find it deeply concerning that so many seem to be zoning out about the threat of nuclear war and WWIII at a time when the world desperately needs to establish global cooperation to deal with the many existential threats to Planet Earth and the Web of Life. As nuclear activist Helen Caldicott put it so well, we now seem to be "sleepwalking into Armageddon."

I don’t know who the wise person is who first said that but they were on to something. I first came across it in a tai chi class. My teacher had said it in reference to something that was “off” in my own practice, and somehow it stuck with me. For a hopelessly type A person like myself, it was just what I needed to hear.

Perfection is an elusive and often problematic notion that seems deeply embedded in our culture. At times, the desire to improve, while noble and good, can take on a life of its own. It gathers its own momentum and before we know it, we’re “pushing the river.”

There was a Planet Fitness where I used to live and I drove by it frequently. Somehow seeing all those dedicated souls working so frenetically to improve their bodies seemed a bit joyless and sad. I get the same impression from some popular exercise regimens that promise to put you through a “boot camp” of some sort. The notion of a tai chi or a yoga boot camp seems to me like a contradiction in terms.

Some yoga programs seem to take on a quality of intense competitive pressure to better oneself instead of doing what yoga was really intended to do: get us to slow down and tune into body, mind, and spirit. This tendency seems like a purely cultural construct that gets mapped onto a practice that’s thousands of years old. What’s wrong with this picture?

Strolling Casually Towards Perfection

My own experience has taught me that, when it comes to natural living and spiritual practice, striving for perfection or adamantly pursuing it is bound to fail. Not only will it fail, it might make us miserable in the bargain.

My tai chi teacher Alan is a wise man and a lineage holder for a practice that extends back thousands of years. His teacher, Bruce Frantzis, advises students to use what he calls the 70 percent principle. This basically means you never apply more than 70 percent of your effort in learning and doing the moves. Alan also advises his students to “stroll casually toward perfection.”

Bringing these practices deeper into my own life has helped me appreciate the value of things that are less than perfect. It also points to the deep flaws in the currently fashionable thinking that we can merge with computer technology to become perfect human beings. I regard this as a kind of pathological thinking that is completely contrary to the need to re-orient ourselves to the natural world and also learn the art of acceptance.

Thinking about Wabi-sabi

There’s a principle in Japanese art call wabi-sabi, which is derived from Buddhism. It cultivates an appreciation for things that are less than perfect. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is ‘imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete’ in nature.”

I like this notion a lot and have thought about it over the years as something worthy of study. I’ll close on this note with a few lines from an unpublished poem of mine called “Making Friends with Wabi-sabi”:

A better day loomed. But now look where we’ve gone.

In this sleek online world, there’s no room for mistakes,

rough edges or anything less than a kind of imperfect perfection.

I miss the wabi-sabi of my youth. And so let us celebrate:

the beauty of crooked things, the beauty of old things and

the beauty of error and redemption.

I've been working in the tech field for some time. This of course necessitates long stretches of time in front of a laptop. Before COVID, when I was physically working in the high tech workplace, I noticed that some of my colleagues would sit for endless hours in front of their computers, never getting up to stretch their legs, take a bio-break (what's the secret?) or talk to a colleague about something interesting happening in their lives.

The idea of being glued to your computer is something that tech companies have heavily promoted for their employees over the years. Unfortunately, it was misguided. Studies show that employees are not more "productive" when they're working on their laptops for hours on end. The science bears this out. So do the experiments I conducted on myself to try and see how I could better satisfy work demands while also maintaining my personal equilibrium. As is the case with so many other things, it's all about balance.

There are a number of practical approaches that allow a person to work not only in a more relaxed way but also in a more effective and focused way at the same time. In the corporate world, these are sometimes called "productivity hacks." More than one CEO has said that they are in the habit of taking a short break every 45 minutes or so, which significantly enhanced their productivity.

Scientific Studies Align with Mindfulness Approaches

The value of taking mini-breaks interwoven with computer work is backed up by studies showing that our attention and “mind energy” starts to decline after about an hour or so. In addition, other medical research has shown that excessive sitting has a number of negative health effects. If you work at home, a yoga, Tai Chi, walking or meditation break after about an hour of computer work in the course of the day can be a great way to start becoming more dialed in to your own optimal work patterns.

Back in the day, before we became an excessively work-obsessed society, there was a certain wisdom to taking breaks in time. Apart from purely religious practices, a day off on the weekend afforded people a chance to recharge and refresh themselves before going "back to the grind." Once the weekends became corporatized so that (basically) retail could make more money, the day reserved for R&R on the weekend became like just any other day and an important social and personal boundary was lost. Once that particular existential oasis went away, the notion of 24/7, "always on" became the new normal, aided and abetted by our technology choices.

The idea of having lunch at your desk is another productivity illusion. In my own work life, I eventually came to the conclusion that taking a lunch break outside the office (meeting a friend for lunch or even doing a few errands) made for a much more productive afternoon. So yes: breaks work, and they make you more productive in the long run. Further, as one of my Tai Chi teachers explained, when you spend hours and hours engaged in the "Martian mind meld" with your laptop, the energy in your body rises up to your head. This is not necessarily a good thing. Taking breaks helps redistribute your energy and ground you.

Has Automation Failed Before It Even Happened?

In the 50’s and 60’s, futurists predicted that automation would create a four-day work week and we would have time aplenty for recharging and smelling the roses. Automation is now here in full force, but I will leave it to others more knowledgeable than me to explain why our overall quality of life has gotten worse, not better.

In the meantime, it’s not hard to notice that the workplace in general has taken on a certain Dickensian quality. In this difficult environment, work/life balance is not something that will necessarily be handed to anyone (although there are some enlightened workplaces sensitized to this need). Rather, it’s something that we have to actively cultivate on our own while balancing the needs of work obligations with those involving family, friends, and just plain old life maintenance.

We are not machines nor should we aspire to be even though in the real world we are constantly being reminded that machines and automation are "coming for us." Let them come. We humans have better things to do than to try to emulate them.

I'm a longtime advocate of holistic health and have been studying and practicing Tai Chi, Qigong, and using many other natural healing modalities for most of my life. However, I also know from personal experience that there are times when allopathic medicine is the best course of action. It all comes down to a kind of balancing act. We all know the failures of our current medical system when it comes to the important health considerations of both prevention and nutrition. Many allopathic (i.e. conventional) primary care physicians (PCPs) willingly admit that they were given little advice and training about nutrition in medical school. Here in the US, it's fairly obvious that the entire healthcare system has been predicated on fixing medical issues rather than trying to prevent them.

Given these realities, what's the best way to balance the two approaches? Personally, I view my medical care as an inter-relational circle of advisors with my PCP and a generalist naturopath at the core. In the periphery, if you will, are various allopathic specialists such as, for example, cardiologists; naturopaths who specialize in certain illnesses or treatments; and then a layer of other types of practitioners I've relied on from time to time including massage therapists, chiropractors, and yoga therapists.

Developing a sense of medical problems as a journey can also be helpful. This entails not expecting a doctor or other practitioner to "fix things" immediately. I've known people who seem to have this inclination, and are eager to just make an appointment whenever anything seems amiss. It's understandable, but sometimes waiting and watching is the best course, depending on the situation. Complex medical problems require time and patience, and sometimes the body-brain just needs time to heal itself or to point us in the right direction.

Let me share a personal experience in this context. I had a problem with sciatica years ago. I had a pretty severe case that had me hobbling around with a cane. I ended up consulting (in sequence) a PCP, two chiropractors, two physical therapists, and a yoga therapist. After a year-long journey trying to alleviate the pain and restore a normal condition, I was still discouraged. A few of the practitioners could alleviate it somewhat, but my long-time chiropractor told me I would always have the pain. (This turned out to be off the mark). On a whim and slightly desperate, I tried some yoga therapy, something that I hadn’t even known existed. Over time, combined with regular massage, the sciatica was healed.

More importantly, as I was going through this journey, I learned valuable lessons along the way from each of those practitioners. This made tuning into my own body easier and helped me actually feel what was happening with the way the pain manifested and affected different parts of the body. I learned what bothered it, what helped it, what movements to avoid, and what exercises I could do to deal with recurrence. As a person given to a "life of the mind" this was a rather dramatic shift.

I grant you that a lot of hard work and applied mindfulness is needed to arrive at this level of self-care. I also grant that many simply do not have the time or inclination to take the same path. In my case, it was fostered in part by a deep interest and strong belief in alternative and self-care. But the argument for doing so is still compelling because increasingly this kind of Emersonian self-reliance will be more and more important as our for-profit healthcare system continues to decline.

As reported by the Washington Post last year, the United States "has the worst health-care system overall among 11 high-income countries, even though it spends the highest proportion of its gross domestic product on health care."This was based on research by the Commonwealth Fund, which conducts independent research on health care. Covid was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

All of this just underscores the need to take more responsibility for self-care care while still judiciously looking for and relying on the allopathic system's value where and when appropriate. It’s definitely a balancing act but one well worth undertaking.

One way or another, science seems to be at the center of our universe these days. Both science and technology certainly form a kind of lens through which we view and measure the world around us. The media is constantly bombarding the public with articles and other coverage advising how to exercise, optimise nutrition, and maintain health on the basis of recent scientific studies, regardless of the fact that many of them sometimes present confusing or conflicting results.

Even more troubling, scientific advice on the subject of nutrition or other areas involving preventive health often reverses itself over the course of time. Now that COVID-19 is here, medical opinion and information about the virus is being positioned as definitive when, in fact, there is much that’s still unknown about the virus and how it functions in human environments.

While the intent of scientific studies is worthy – to foster better healthcare – the underlying assumption of much medical advice seems to be that the general public can’t quite be trusted to make these kinds of decisions on their own. Those who don’t blindly accept the authority of various pronouncements by the medical establishment about things like diet and nutrition (whether doing so on the basis of a spiritual stance, a holistic lifestyle, or for some other reasons) are sometimes accused of being ‘anti-science’.

This kind of false dichotomy and polarisation has been going on for some time, but seems to have ramped up considerably over the last five years. In January 2015, for example, a cover story appeared in National Geographic called ‘The War on Science’. The article grouped together those who denied that the moon landing was an actual event and other fringe ideas with people who opposed the use of GMO foods. What was disingenuous and flat-out wrong about this arbitrary grouping was the assumption that all of these views could be easily categorised as a single phenomenon.

The reality on the ground is quite different. While most people would likely place moon landing deniers in the much dreaded ‘conspiracy theorists’ category, major opposition to the use of GMO products in the food supply has now gone mainstream. Years ago, the popular fast-casual US food outlet Chipotle Grill came out with a stringent and well-publicised non-GMO policy. Many conventional food producers such as Post Cereals now label some of their products as GMO free. And a wide range of consumers now avoid GMO products.

A Return to Ancient Values?

This odd clash of values hardly suggests an easy relationship between science and various forms of natural approaches to health and medicine or environmentally-aware values. But why should this tension exist at all? And why do many in the established scientific community spend so much time trying to convince us that holistic or natural approaches are not advisable?

Many people who are oriented towards natural health solutions are also involved in alternative spiritual practices or even some forms of traditional religious involvement. We might then justifiably ask if there is a larger phenomenon at work here, perhaps involving a clash of deeper belief systems percolating under the surface of these dust-ups. Is this deeper dynamic some kind of oppositional relationship between Western scientific materialism and an emerging consciousness, or quasi-spiritual awareness, oriented towards reverence for the earth, nature, and natural processes? An awareness that might have roots in deep history and that recognises that we are now being called upon to make radical changes in our current way of life to protect our environment and our planetary home from disaster?

The notion of a conflict between either science and spirituality or between science and the humanities runs deep in Western thought. In 1959, British scientist C.P. Snow gave a famous lecture on the ‘The Two Cultures’, predicated on the idea that science and the humanities had become split into two oppositional cultures. Science and religion have for decades been regarded by some as antithetical, but as compatible by others (including the Dalai Lama). This debate still appears to be alive and well. And there are many commentators who look to assure us that there’s no conflict between science and religion, including well-known spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra. In a popular PBS program from 2015, The Future of God, he argued that there are great similarities between quantum science and spiritual modes of thought.

On one level at least, this is likely very possible. Correspondence at the highest levels of science with aspects of spiritual and metaphysical reality has been explored extensively. Einstein wrote many insightful essays about this phenomenon, and Gary Zukav’s classic book The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics made another important contribution. Many practitioners of alternative spirituality also hold to the view that quantum physics and spirituality are mutually supportive.

Pure Science vs. Technocratic Science

When we start peeling the onion and looking deeper into these issues, however, it becomes apparent that this easy confluence of values only works at the highest levels of pure science.

It is in the realms of quantum physics and advanced theoretical science where the nature of reality itself – also the terrain of the spiritual and metaphysical – is explored and examined. Here there is not only a lack of conflict but one body of knowledge informs and at times even illuminates the other. However, the same cannot be said for other domains of science where much of the confusion about the relationship of science and spirituality also tends to bubble up.

The kind of science we’ve been talking about so far is pure science as opposed to applied science. The latter, along with the technology used to implement it, has much more impact on our daily lives and the overall quality of life. There’s a huge difference between the pure science that Chopra and Zukav focus on and the often heavily corporatised applied science that now filters down through various technology regimes, affecting all of us. These regimes include modern medicine, which is heavily influenced by Big Pharma and threatened by natural approaches to health and wellbeing that are nowhere near as lucrative.

In many cases, behind that powerful and influential body of applied science and technology lies a specific system of institutionalised values and assumptions about how we should live, expressed expressed in the offerings of institutional medicine. As these systems filter through society, aided and abetted by powerful corporate or institutional interests, we see them attempting to shape our cultural norms. In this unfolding, holistic health or more spiritually oriented methods of healing such as Qigong become medically suspect. One especially pernicious mindset working against these other forms of healing is the notion that if something can’t be measured or quantified, it can’t be a valid and worthy aspect of human experience, a belief system associated with a hidden systems of values called scientific materialism.

With the increase in emphasis in our educational systems on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and the corresponding decline in liberal arts, music, and art, these values are becoming increasingly prevalent. In addition, they are serving to reinforce the already strong tendency towards scientific materialism already prevalent in our culture. I would suggest that it is this mindset that is at odds with not only spirituality but also with holistic and natural medicine. Further, there are many examples of alternative approaches – even the simple act of taking vitamins – now under attack by Big Pharma and other medically oriented corporate interests.

In conclusion, these observations will hopefully suggest that – rather than some sort of ‘war on science’ taking place as the National Geographic article would have us believe – we might consider the possibility that the opposite dynamic is taking place. Perhaps the deeper reality is that science – or more accurately the system of values and assumptions associated with corporate-funded applied science and technology – is in fact attacking spirituality, holistic health, environmental awareness, and any other regimes of thought that might purport to challenge its claim on ultimate authority.