FROM SCIENCE TO GOD
A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness
Peter Russell

INTRODUCTION

It was the spring of 1996; I had been invited to a small seminar, deep in the California redwoods, to discuss the evolution of consciousness. As I sat there listening to various debates about the nature of mind, recent discoveries in neurochemistry, and theories on the origins of consciousness, I felt increasingly frustrated. I wanted to say, “We’ve got it all backwards,” or words to that effect. But I couldn’t express my misgivings in a coherent, well-reasoned manner — which one needs to do in those settings to be taken seriously. So I bit my lip and sat with my frustration.

A few weeks later, on a plane from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I opened an old book I had recently come across. The author, a Dutchman writing in the 1920s, was not saying anything that was new to me, but he reminded me of the processes of perception and the way we construct our experience of reality. My readings in philosophy, particularly the writings of Immanuel Kant, came flooding back; so did my studies in physics on the nature of light, and my explorations into Eastern philosophy and meditation.

Suddenly the root of my frustration became clear. We need more than a new theory of consciousness. We must reconsider some of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. That was the insight that was trying to break through at the seminar. I started scribbling, and by the time the plane landed, the picture was clear. Our whole worldview needed to be turned inside out.

Over the following months, I worked on an essay pulling together the various pieces of a model of reality in which consciousness played a primary role. In the process, I discovered that the implications were even deeper than I had supposed. The new worldview not only changed the way science looked at consciousness, it also led to a new view of spirituality — and, most surprisingly, to a new concept of God.

The seeds sown on that plane flight have now grown into this book. As with any exploration of such profound issues, the ideas are not complete, and may never be complete. They represent my current thinking on the key ingredients of a new worldview, and how consciousness could be the long-awaited bridge between science and spirit.

As much as the book is a journey of ideas that starts with science and arrives at God, it is also my own personal journey from being a physicist with little interest in spiritual matters to an explorer of consciousness who now begins to appreciate what the great spiritual teachings have been saying for thousands of years.

CHAPTER ONE

From Science to Consciousness

People travel to wonder at the height of
mountains, at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers, at the vast
compass of the ocean, at the circular
motion of the stars; and they pass by
themselves without wondering.

— St. Augustine

I have always been a scientist at heart. As a teenager, I delighted in learning how the world works — how sound travels through the air, why metals expand when heated, why bleaches bleach, why acids burn, how plants know when to bloom, how we see color, why a lens bends light, how spinning tops keep their balance, why snowflakes are six-pointed stars, and why the sky is blue.

The more I discovered, the more fascinated I became. At sixteen I was devouring Einstein and marveling at the paradoxical world of quantum physics. I delved into different theories of how the universe began, and pondered the mysteries of space and time. I had a passion for knowing, an insatiable curiosity about the laws and principles that governed the world.

I was equally intrigued by mathematics, sometimes called “the queen and servant”of science. Whether it was the swing of a pendulum, the vibrations of an atom, or the path of an arrow shot into the wind, every physical process had an underlying mathematical expression. The premises of mathematics were so basic, so obvious, so simple, yet from them unfolded rules governing the most complex of phenomena. I remember the exhilaration I felt upon discovering how the same basic equation — one of the simplest and most elegant of all mathematical equations—governs the propagation of light, the vibrations of a violin string, the coiling of a spiral, and the orbits of the planets.

Matter has reached the point of beginning
to know itself….[Man is] a star’s way of
knowing about stars.

— George Wald

Numbers, so boring to many, were to me magical. Irrational and imaginary numbers, infinite series, indefinite integrals — I could not get enough of them. I loved the way they all fitted together, like pieces of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Most intriguing of all was how the whole world of mathematics unfolded by the simple application of reason. It seemed to describe a preordained universal truth that transcended matter, time, and space. Mathematics depended on nothing, and yet everything depended on it. If you had asked me then whether there was a God, I would have pointed to mathematics.


Excerpted from From Science to God Copyright © 2002 by New World Library
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