POWER OF YOGA

TIME MAGAZINE

Stars do it. Sports do it. Judges in the highest courts do it. Let's do it: that yoga thing. A path to enlightenment that winds back 5,000 years in its native India, yoga has suddenly become so hot, so cool, so very this minute. It's the exercise cum meditation for the new millennium, one that doesn't so much pump you up as bliss you out. Yoga now straddles the continent — from Hollywood, where $20 million-a-picture actors queue for a session with their guru du jour, to Washington, where, in the gym of the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and 15 others faithfully take their class each Tuesday morning.

Everywhere else, Americans rush from their high-pressure jobs and tune in to the authoritatively mellow voice of an instructor, gently urging them to solder a union (the literal translation of the Sanskrit word yoga) between mind and body. These Type A strivers want to become Type B seekers, to lose their blues in an asana (pose), to graduate from distress to de-stress. Fifteen million Americans include some form of yoga in their fitness regimen — twice as many as did five years ago; 75% of all U.S. health clubs offer yoga classes. Many in those classes are looking not inward but behind. As supermodel Christy Turlington, a serious practitioner, says, "Some of my friends simply want to have a yoga butt." But others come to the discipline in hopes of restoring their troubled bodies. Yoga makes me feel better, they say. Maybe it can cure what ails me.
Oprah Winfrey, arbiter of moral and literary betterment for millions of American women, devoted a whole show to the benefits of yoga earlier this month, with guest appearances by Turlington and stud-muffin guru Rodney Yee. Testimonials from everyday yogis and yoginis clogged the hour: I lost weight; I quit smoking; I conquered my fear of flying; I can sleep again; it saved my marriage; it improved my daughter's grades and attitude. "We are more centered as a team," declared the El Monte Firefighters of Los Altos Hills, Calif.
Sounds great. Namaste, as your instructor says at the end of a session: the divine in me bows to the divine in you. But let's up the ante a bit. Is yoga more than the power of positive breathing? Can it, say, cure cancer? Fend off heart attacks? Rejuvenate post-menopausal women? Just as important for yoga's application by mainstream doctors, can its presumed benefits be measured by conventional medical standards? Is yoga, in other words, a science?
By even asking the question, we provoke a clash of two powerful cultures, two very different ways of looking at the world. The Indian tradition develops metaphors and ways of describing the body (life forces, energy centers) as it is experienced, from the inside out. The Western tradition looks at the body from the outside in, peeling it back one layer at a time, believing only what it can see, measure and prove in randomized, double-blind tests. The East treats the person; the West treats the disease. "Our system of medicine is very fragmented," says Dr. Carrie Demers, who runs the Center for Health and Healing at the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy of the USA in Honesdale, Pa. "We send you to different specialists to look at different parts of you. Yoga is more holistic; it's interested in the integration of body, breath and mind."
The few controlled studies that have been done offer cause for hope. A 1990 study of patients who had coronary heart disease indicated that a regimen of aerobic exercise and stress reduction, including yoga, combined with a low-fat vegetarian diet, stabilized and in some cases reversed arterial blockage. The author Dr. Dean Ornish is in the midst of a study involving men with prostate cancer. Can diet, yoga and meditation affect the progress of this disease? So far, Ornish will say only that the data are encouraging.
To the skeptic, all evidence is anecdotal. But some anecdotes are more than encouraging; they are inspiring. Consider Sue Cohen, 54, an accountant, breast-cancer survivor and five-year yoga student at the Unity Woods studio in Bethesda, Md. "After my cancer surgery," Cohen says, "I thought I might never lift my arm again. Then here I am one day, standing on my head, leaning most of my 125-lb. body weight on that arm I thought I'd never be able to use again. Chemotherapy, surgery and some medications can rob you of mental acuity, but yoga helps compensate for the loss. It impels you to do things you never thought you were capable of doing."
A series of exercises as old as the Sphinx could prove to be the medical miracle of tomorrow — or just wishful thinking from the millions who have embraced yoga in a bit more than a generation.
Yoga was little known in the U.S. — perhaps only as an enthusiasm of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other icons of the Beat Generation — when the Beatles and Mia Farrow journeyed to India to sit at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. Since then, yoga has endured more evolutions of popular consciousness than a morphing movie monster. First it signaled spiritual cleansing and rebirth, a nontoxic way to get high. Then it was seen as a kind of preventive medicine that helped manage and reduce stress. "The third wave was the fitness wave," says Richard Faulds, president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Mass. "And that's about strength and flexibility and endurance."
At each stage, the most persuasive advocates were movie idols and rock stars — salesmen, by example, of countless beguiling or corrosive fashions. If they could make cocaine and tattoos fashionable, perhaps they could goad the masses toward physical and spiritual enlightenment. Today yoga is practiced by so many stars with whom audiences are on a first-name basis — Madonna, Julia, Meg, Ricky, Michelle, Gwyneth, Sting — that it would be shorter work to list the actors who don't assume the asana. (James Gandolfini? We're just guessing.)

David Duchovny practices Kundalini yoga; Julia Louis-Dreyfuss prefers Ashtanga. Sabrina the Teenage Witch stars Melissa Joan Hart and Soleil Moon Frye throw yoga parties. Jane Fonda cut out aerobics for it; Angelina Jolie buffed up for Tomb Raider with it. The newly clean Charlie Sheen used yoga and dieting to shed 30 lbs. Add at least two Sex in the City vamps, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis. All three Dixie Chicks. Sports stars from basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Yankee pitcher Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez are devotees. And speaking of athletes, who showed up the other day at Turlington's lower Manhattan haunt, the Jivamukti Yoga Center? Monica Lewinsky.

Where there's a yoga blitz, there must be yoga biz. To dress for a class, you need only some old, loose-fitting clothes — and since you perform barefoot, no fancy footwear. Yet Nike and J.Crew have developed exercise apparel, as has Turlington. For those who prefer stay-at-home yoga, the video-store racks groan with hot, moving tapes. The Living Yoga series of instructional videos taught by Yee and Patricia Walden occupies five of the top eight slots on Amazon's vhs best-seller list. "Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect," says Walden. "If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine. Most people get beyond that and see that it's much, much more." By embodying the grace and strength of their system, Yee and Walden are its most charismatic proselytizers — new luminaries in the yoga firmament.
"Madonna found it first, and I'm following in the footsteps of the stars," groans Minneapolis attorney Patricia Bloodgood. "But I don't think you should reject something just because it's trendy." Bloodgood had the bright idea to commandeer part of the lobby in the office building where she works for a Monday-evening yoga class. Yoginis can spend a weekend at (or devote their lives to) such retreats as Kripalu, where each year 20,000 visitors take part in programs ranging from "The Science of Pranayama and Bandha" to African-drum workshops and singles weekends. In L.A. they can mingle with the glamourati at Maha Yoga (where students bend to the strains of the Beatles' Baby You're a Rich Man) or Golden Bridge (where celebrity moms take prenatal yoga classes).
Yoga is where you find it and how you want it, from Big Time to small town. In the Texas town of Odessa, Therese Archer's Body & Soul Center for Well-Being has 15 dedicated students, including an 18-wheeler diesel mechanic who drives 50 miles from Andrews, Texas, to attend classes. "He is very West Texas," Archer says, "and I thought he would flip when he saw what we did." Yet in eight months the mechanic has sweated his way up from beginning to advanced work. At the 8 Count exercise studio in Monticello, Ga., Suzanne McGinnis runs a "yoga cardio class" that mixes postures with push-ups, all to the disco beat of tunes like Leo Sayer's You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'. As yoga classes go, this is not an arduous one, but the students don't know that. They grunt and groan exultantly with each stretch, and are happy to relax when McGinnis stops to check her teaching aids: torn-out magazine pages and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Yoga.
So yoga can be fun or be made fun of; it can help you look marvelous or feel marvelous. These aspects are not insignificant. They demonstrate the roots yoga has dug into America's cultural soil — deep enough for open-minded researchers to consider how it might bloom into a therapy to treat or prevent disease.
The sensible practice of yoga does more than slap a Happy Face on your cerebrum. It can also massage the lymph system, says Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiac surgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Lymph is the body's dirty dishwater; a network of lymphatic vessels and storage sacs crisscross over the entire body, in parallel with the blood supply, carrying a fluid composed of infection-fighting white blood cells and the waste products of cellular activity. Exercise in general activates the flow of lymph through the body, speeding up the filtering process; but yoga in particular promotes the draining of the lymph. Certain yoga poses stretch muscles that from animal studies are known to stimulate the lymph system. Researchers have documented the increased lymph flow when dogs' paws are stretched in a position similar to the yoga "downward-facing dog."
Yoga relaxes you and, by relaxing, heals. At least that's the theory. "The autonomic nervous system," explains Kripalu's Faulds, "is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the Relaxation Response. When you do yoga — the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body — you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the Relaxation Response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms."
But the process isn't automatic. Especially in their first sessions, yoga students may have trouble suppressing those competitive beta waves. We want to better ourselves, but also to do better than others; we force ourselves into the gym-rat race. "Genuine Hatha yoga is a balance of trying and relaxing," says Dr. Timothy McCall, an internist and the author of Examining Your Doctor: A Patient's Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care. "But a lot of gym yoga is about who can do this really difficult contortion to display to everyone else in the class." The workout warriors have to realize that yoga is more an Athenian endeavor than a Spartan one. You don't win by punishing your body. You convince it, seduce it, talk it down from the ledge of ambition and anxiety. Yoga is not a struggle but a surrender.
It may take a while for the enlightenment bulb to switch on — for you to get the truth of the yoga maxim that what you can do is what you should do. But when it happens, it's an epiphany, like suddenly knowing, in your bones and your dreams, the foreign language you've been studying for months. In yoga, this is your mind-body language.
In daily life, that gym-rat pressure is even more intense: our jobs, our marriages, our lives are at stake. Says McCall: "We know that a high percentage of the maladies that people suffer from have at least some component of stress in them, if they're not overtly caused by stress. Stress causes a rise of blood pressure, the release of catecholamines (neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate many of the body's metabolic processes). We know that when catecholamine levels are high, there tends to be more platelet aggregation, which makes a heart attack more likely." So instead of a drug, say devotees, prescribe yoga. "All the drugs we give people have side effects," McCall says. "Well, yoga has side effects too: better strength, better balance, peace of mind, stronger bones, cardiovascular conditioning, lots of stuff. Here is a natural health system that, once you learn the basics, you can do at home for free with very little equipment and that could help you avoid expensive, invasive surgical and pharmacological interventions. I think this is going to be a big thing."
McCall, it should be said, is a true believer who teaches at the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Center in Boston. But more mainstream physicians seem ready to agree. At New York Presbyterian, all heart patients undergoing cardiac procedures are offered massages and yoga during recovery. At Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, cardiac doctors suggest that their patients enroll in the hospital's Preventive and Rehabilitative Cardiac Center, which offers yoga, among other therapies. "While we haven't tested yoga as a stand-alone therapy," says Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, the center's director, patients opting for yoga do show "tremendous benefits." These include lower cholesterol levels and blood pressure, increased cardiovascular circulation and, as the Ornish study showed, reversal of artery blockage in some cases.
Yoga may help post-menopausal women. Practitioners at Boston's Mind-Body Institute have incorporated forward-bending poses that massage the organs in the neuroendocrine axis (the line of glands that include the pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid and adrenals) to bring into balance whatever hormones are askew, thus alleviating the insomnia and mood swings that often accompany menopause. The program is not recommended as a substitute for hormone-replacement therapy, only as an adjunct.
Some physicians wonder why it would be tried at all. "Theoretically, if you pressed hard enough on the thyroid, you possibly could affect secretion," says Dr. Yank Coble, an endocrinologist at the University of Florida. "But it's pretty rare. And the adrenal glands are carefully protected above the kidneys deep inside the body. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that you can manipulate the adrenals with body positions. That'd be a new one."

In 1998 Dr. Ralph Schumacher, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Marian Garfinkel, a yoga teacher, published a brief paper on carpal tunnel syndrome in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The eight-week study determined that "a yoga-based regimen was more effective than wrist splinting or no treatment in relieving some symptoms and signs of carpal tunnel syndrome." Letters to JAMA challenged the study's methodology. The authors replied that it was a preliminary investigation to determine if further research was merited. They said it was.
The most cited study around — Ornish's in 1990 — tested 94 patients with angiographically documented coronary heart disease, of whom 53 were prescribed yoga, group support and a vegetarian diet extremely low in fat — only 10% of total daily calories (most Americans consume 35% in fat; the American Heart Association recommends 30%). Cholesterol changes among the experimental group were about the same as if they had taken cholesterol-lowering drugs. After a year in the program, patients in this group showed "significant overall regression of coronary atherosclerosis as measured by quantitative coronary arteriography." Those in the control group "showed significant overall progression of coronary atherosclerosis." The findings were well received but open to a major challenge: that the severe diet, rather than yoga, may have been the crucial factor.
In 1998 Ornish published a new study, in the American Journal of Cardiology, stating that 80% of the 194 patients in the experimental group were able to avoid bypass or angioplasty by adhering to lifestyle changes, including yoga. He also argued that lifestyle interventions would save money — that the average cost per patient in the experimental group was about $18,000, whereas the cost per patient in the control group was more than $47,000. And this time, Ornish says, he is convinced that "adherence to the yoga and meditation program was as strongly correlated with the changes in the amount of blockage as was the adherence to diet."
Ornish hoped for more than the respect of his peers: he wanted action. "I used to think good science was enough to change medical practice," he says, "but I was naive. Most doctors still aren't prescribing yoga and meditation. We've shown that heart disease can be reversed. Yet doctors are still performing surgery; insurance companies are paying for medication — and they're not paying for diet and lifestyle-change education." (Medicare, however, recently agreed to pay for 1,800 patients taking Ornish's program for reversing heart disease.)
Why have so few studies tested the efficacy of yoga? For lots of reasons. Those sympathetic to yoga think the benefits are proved by millenniums of empirical evidence in India; those who are suspicious think it can't be proved. (Says Coble: "There seem to be no data to substantiate the argument that yoga can heal.") Further, its effects on the body and mind are so complex and pervasive that it would be nearly impossible to certify any specific changes in the body to yoga. The double-blind test, beloved of traditional researchers, is impossible when one group in a study is practicing healthy yoga; what is the control group to practice — bad yoga? Finally, the traditional funders of studies, the pharmaceutical giants, see no financial payoff in validating yoga: no patentable therapies, no pills. (Ornish's prostate-cancer study was funded by private organizations, including the Michael Milken Foundation.)
at the heart of the western medical establishment's skepticism of yoga is a profound hubris: the belief that what we have been able to prove so far is all that is true. At the beginning of the 20th century, doctors and researchers surely looked back at the beginning of the 19th and smiled at how primitive "medical science" had been. A century from now, we may look back at today's body of lore with the same condescension.
"In modern medicine, we're actually doing a lot more guesswork than we let on," says Demers. "We want to say we understand everything. We don't understand half of it. It's scary how clueless we are." Desperate patients consult half a dozen specialists and get half a dozen conflicting opinions. "Well, of course," Dr. Toby Brown, a Manassas, Va., radiologist says impatiently, "it's not as if medicine is a science." Hence the appeal of alternative medicine: aromatherapy, homeopathy, ginkgo biloba. Proponents may be crusading scientists or snake-oil salesmen, but either way, their pitch falls on eager ears: each year Americans spend some $27 billion on so-called complementary medicine. "One lesson of the alternative health-care movement," McCall warns, "is that the public is not going to wait for doctors to get it together."
Late last month the National Institutes of Health held the first major conference on mind-body research. "There is a major reason that many in biomedicine reject mind-body research: it is the pervasive sound of the popularizers," noted Dr. Robert Rose, executive director at the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on mind, brain, body and health research. "The loudest voices, the most passionate and articulate spokespersons for the power of the mind to heal come not from the research community but from the growing number of gurus... the hawkers on TV for alternative treatments, herbs, homeopathy, handbooks." Rose distinguished the nostrum pushers from those seeking to bring yoga and science together. "Thousands of research studies have shown that in the practice of yoga a person can learn to control such physiologic parameters as blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory function, metabolic rate, skin resistance, brain waves and body temperature, among other body functions." Critics are quick to note that few of those studies were published in leading science journals.
Two oddities attend yoga's vogue. One is that America has the fittest people in the world, and the most obese. Yoga, typically, is practiced by the fit. Exercise, the care and feeding of body and possibly mind, is their second career. The folks in urgent need of yoga are the ones who are at the fast-food counter getting their fries supersize; who would rather take a pill than devote a dozen hours a week to yoga; for whom meditation is staring glassily at six hours of football each Sunday; and who might go under the surgeon's knife more readily than they would ingest anything more Indian than tandoori chicken.
Here's another peculiarity: this ritual of relaxation is cresting at a cultural moment when noise and agitation are everywhere. We work longer hours, with TVs and portable radios blaring as the sound track for frantic wage slaves. If a teen isn't trussed to his headphones or plugged into a chat room, it's because his cell phone has just beeped. America is running in place, in the spa or at work. And after Letterman and Clinton, nobody takes the world seriously; everything is up for laughs.
In this modern maelstrom, yoga's tendency to stasis and silence seems at first insane, then inspired. The notion of bodies at rest becoming souls at peace is reactionary, radical and liberating. If it cures nagging backache, swell. But isn't it bliss just to sit this one out, to freeze-frame the frenzy, to say no to all that and om to what may be beyond it, or within ourselves?

What Is Prayer?

Mahatma Gandhi

In my opinion to do justice is the best form of prayer and one who is sincere about doing justice to all does not need to do any more praying. Some people spend a long time over sandhya and 95% of them do not understand the meaning of what they say. In my opinion prayer should be said in one's mother tongue. It alone can affect the soul best. I should say that a sincere prayer for one minute is enough. It should suffice to promise God not to sin. .
Prayer means asking God for something in a reverent attitude. But the word is used also to denote any devotional act. Worship is a better term to use for what the correspondent has in mind. But definition apart, what is it that millions of Hindus, Mussulmans, Christians and Jews and others do every day during the time set apart for the adoration of the Maker? It seems to me that it is a yearning of the heart to be one with the Maker, an invocation for His blessing. It is in this case the attitude that matters, not words uttered or muttered. And often the association of words that have been handed down from ancient times has an effect which in their rendering into one's mother tongue they will lose altogether. Thus the Gayatri translated and recited in, say, Gujarati, will not have the same effect as the original. The utterance of the word "Rama" will'. instantaneously affect millions of Hindus, when the word "God", although they may understand the meaning, will leave them untouched. Words after all acquire a power by long usage and sacredness associated with their use. There is much therefore to be said for the retention of the old Sanskrit formulae for the most prevalent mantra; or verses. That the meaning of them should be properly understood goes without saying.
There can be no fixed rule laid down as to the time these devotional acts should take. It depends upon individual temperament. These are precious moments in one's daily life. The exercises are intended to sober and humble us and enable us to realize that nothing happens without His will and that we are but "clay in the hands of the Potter". These are moments when one reviews one's immediate past, confesses one's weakness, asks for forgiveness and strength to be and do better. One minute may be enough for some, twenty-four hours may be too little for others. For those who are filled with the presence of God in them, to labour is to pray. Their life is one continuous prayer or act of worship. For those others who act only to sin, to indulge themselves, and live for self, no time is too much. If they had patience and faith and the will to be pure, they would pray till they feel the definite purifying presence of God within them. For us ordinary mortals there-must be a middle path between these two extremes. We are not so exalted as to be able to say that all our acts are a dedication nor perhaps are we so far gone as to be living purely for self. Hence have all religions set apart times for general devotion. Unfortunately these have nowadays become merely mechanical and formal, where they are not hypocritical. What is necessary therefore is the correct attitude to accompany these devotions.
For definite personal prayer in' the sense of asking God for something, it should certainly be own tongue. Nothing can be grander than to to make us act justly towards everything that lives.

Art of living

Sonu Niigaam

God lives in him, believes Sonu Niigaam. That is why the singer does not make a conscious effort to search for the Almighty in temples
IT was in 1998 when I received a spiritual awakening. I had turned 25 that day. I was flying from Miami to West Indies for my music concert. En route, I bought this book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. The book wasn’t about God but about ego — how to handle your ego which often comes in the way of your happiness. For the first time, I realised the way I was leading my life was the way to live. That affirmation made a huge difference to me. This book reaffirmed the principles I always believed in. For example, I always believed that happiness is a state of mind. I also had this insight that I am God myself and so is everybody around me. Later, when my sister, a yoga teacher, gifted me this book, Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, it sort of reaffirmed my belief. Hence, there is no need to look for Him only in a temple. So I decided, henceforth, I will visit temples only when I want to, not because I have to. I also do not indulge in any ritual practices. But we still organise havans at home because my p a r - e n t s wa n t to cont i nu e w i t h them. M y prayer is to learn new things, imbibe fresh insights. You must not take life too seriously. You must enjoy the process of living. For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one —reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new, that's my prayer. I know my destiny is moksh or liberation. I will not die for money or success. I am satisfied living the life I am leading and I will die with dignity. Right now, I work like a donkey, but when I am old, life will be different. In a farm house across the lake, doing yoga and enjoying vegetarian food. If there is reincarnation, I would like to be born as Sonu Niigaam.

Interview with Fritjof Capra

BY RENÉE WEBER

I want to propose considering a hypothetical example, let's call it science fiction or philosophy fiction. Let's postulate that there is a physicist who is so good at his work that he is Nobel caliber; he's a Nobel prize winning particle physicist who later in his life also explores consciousness to such a depth that he becomes the equivalent of a Buddha figure. In my mind, this person has to be both a Nobel quality physicist and a "Nobel quality" spiritual person. He's absolutely adept at both. What, if anything, can he tell us that an ordinary physicist, an ordinary mystic, could not tell us? In particular, I guess, I'm asking, would he know more? Is his advantage only that he would be better able to relate one paradigm to the other? Or could he propose, for example, by virtue of his also being an enlightened consciousness, more perceptive, crucial experiments in physics that would somehow bear on inner states of consciousness? I'm curious as to whether you have any views on this.

FRITJOF CAPRA: Well, it's of course very difficult to imagine such a person because of the complementary nature of the two approaches. You would have a hard time becoming a Buddha figure after being a Nobel caliber physicist. But anyway, let us talk about a first rate Einstein, or any of the great physicists. Now such a person has already a high degree of intuition. And this intuition will be sharpened through the mystical training. And then once he went through this mystical training and became enlightened, he would be sublime in his intuition; he would also, by some miracle, not have forgotten his mathematics. He will be able to get back and resume where he left off and do the physics.

WEBER: Would he have an advantage over other physicists in doing pure physics?

CAPRA: He would have the advantage of being able to work much better. Because somebody who goes very far into meditation can marshall his or her energies in a much better way. I know this from experience because I know physicists who are involved in mystical traditions, who are Zen Buddhists or Vedantists; they do the same work in six hours that other people would do in ten hours. That would be one advantage.

WEBER: My next question is: could he forge a bridge between the language of physics and the language of mysticism, or the models thereof? Could he better interpret the one world for those in the other world?

CAPRA: Well, one would think so, but it depends on what kind of physicist we are talking about. If we are talking about a Niels Bohr figure, then he would have difficulty with language, as Bohr had. If we talk about a Feynman—but that's almost a contradiction in terms because Feynman is so against this whole mysticism.

WEBER: I know that, but remember this is my science fiction example, and we're allowed to speculate wildly.

CAPRA: Okay, we'll do some genetic engineering combining Feynman and the Buddha into one person. So then he would have an advantage, and he would be able to interpret mystical experience in terms which make contact with the scientific terms. As far as coming up with mathematical models is concerned, I think he would do it just on the basis of being a good physicist.

WEBER: I suppose that is a more conservative interpretation of what I have in mind. I mean something much wilder. Could he as a scientist formulate experiments that no one now has the imagination to propose?

CAPRA: No, I don't think so.

WEBER: Why is that?

CAPRA: Because this requires a totally different mind frame. You see, not even the theorists are often very good at proposing experiments. It's the experimental physicists who are good at this, because they know the machines. They have this direct contact with the apparatus, and they are good at proposing experiments. In the good physics institutions and research centers, there's always a close collaboration and a close contact between the theorists and the experimenters. But I don't think that any mystical insights would help with those details.

WEBER: But you feel the theoretical component would be affected.

CAPRA: Yes, because theories are always based on a certain philosophy, or predilection.WEBER: And an intuition. This person would be more deeply in touch with alternative modes of space and time and consciousness and interconnectedness, not just intellectually but literally. He would have lived in and experienced those modes.

CAPRA: Yes, but you know, as I said before, physicists also have that without being mystics.

WEBER: But to a lesser degree, you were saying. Now this is a full blown version of it, isn't it?CAPRA: Well, I don't know whether he could be any more full blown than Bohr was. I really don't know.

WEBER: Do you think Bohr felt himself indissolubly one with the universe?

CAPRA: Definitely, definitely.

WEBER: There is evidence?

CAPRA: Oh yes, definitely.

WEBER: But that is the description you've attached to the mystic?

CAPRA: Yes.WEBER: So you're saying Bohr was a mystic.

CAPRA: Yes, oh yes.

WEBER: Earlier in the interview you said he was a highly intuitive person, but now you are going further.

CAPRA: Well, I now take mystic in a broader sense. Bohr did not have any mystical training, and I don't think he meditated on a regular basis. But his work was his meditation.

WEBER: I understand. He got a personal conviction of the unity of things in a way that didn't necessarily involve sitting down cross-legged in a room.

CAPRA: Right. Bohr's science was his mysticism. And you know, I would almost suspect that this hypothetical person, if he really wanted to do physics and were a mystic, would just do physics. You see, in the Eastern traditions, the most enlightened becomes the most ordinary. And so these great sages just went around cutting firewood and drawing water.

WEBER: After you're enlightened, the mountain is once again a mountain.

CAPRA: Yes, and the proton would become a proton, the electron an electron, and our Buddha would just be a physicist.

Interview with Fritjof Capra

By Barbara Vogl

Fritjof Capra is the author of the ground-breaking book, The Tao of Physics (1975) which explores the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. He observed that the world views of both physics and Eastern mysticism emerge when humans "enquire into the essential nature of things, the deeper realms of matter in physics; the deeper realms of consciousness in mysticism when they discover a different reality behind the superficial mechanistic appearance of everyday life." (p. 304) From this beginning, his other books such as his latest, The Web of Life, and his popular film, Mind Walk, have consistently laid the path to his present work as founder and director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. The Center is dedicated to fostering the understanding and practice of the principles of ecology, the "language of nature." It is dedicated to using those principles for creating sustainable human communities; in particular, learning communities.I first met Fritjof when he was a post doctoral lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late '60s. It is obvious to me now, that at that time, his explorations into Eastern mysticism was a search for his own path. At the beginning of The Tao of Physics, he quotes Carlos Castaneda, from The Teachings of Don Juan, a book that had a profound affect on many of us UCSC students. "Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question...Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use." Fritjof Capra's work has heart. I felt it when I met him for the following interview at a cafe in Berkeley where he lives with his wife and 13 year old daughter. ~Barbara Vogl, Editor Barbara: I was reading the book of your conversations with the Benedictine monks, Brother David Stendl-Rost and Brother Thomas Matus, where you emphasize the importance of the sense of Belonging to the Universe, the title of the book. So many of us are confused and wondering where they belong now in our very complex society.

I was wondering how the systemic concept of self-organization in our individual lives and organizations can be useful in helping us to see how to get through the anxiety in our period of transitionÑpassing into new paradigm thinking.

Fritjof: Well I think self-organization and the newer understanding of life and complexity, when it is applied to the social realm and human organizations, can help people to find their authenticity as human beings The old paradigm model is a mechanistic model where people are seen as parts of a big machine and the machine is designed by experts who either sit at the top of the organization or are brought in from outside as consultants. Then this design of new structures is imposed upon the people who work in the organization and they are pigeon-holed in certain departments with well-defined boundaries. So the underlying model is that of a machine working very smoothly.What self-organization tells you, among many other things, is that creativity is an inherent property of all living systems. All living systems are creative because they have the ability to reach out and create something new. In the last 20-25 years we have begun to understand the dynamics of this creativity, in terms of emergence of new structures and in terms of instability, bifurcation points, and the spontaneous emergence of order. This is the underlying dynamics of creativity at all levels of life.When people understand this they will realize that human individuals as well as groups of individuals are inherently creative. So when you have an organization and you want to design a new structure and you bring in outside experts and then impose this structure on the organization you have to spend a lot of energy and money to sell the idea to the employees and the manager. Since human beings are inherently creative they will not accept the idea as it is. since this will deny their humanity. Therefore you can give them orders and they will nominally adhere to the orders but they will circumvent the orders; they will re-invent the orders and will modify it, either boycott it or embellish it, adding their own interpretation.

B. Otherwise their soul wouldn't be in it.

F. So the smart thing.... and entrepreneurs and managers are beginning to learn this now... is not to impose a new structure but to involve people in the creation of this organization because that acknowledges their humanity and inherent creativity. When they participate from the start you don't need to sell them the idea because it is their idea. The ideas of self-organization are very important to understand the autonomy, the authenticity and basic humanity of people.

B. There is so much talk now of the soul and the spirit and this is seeping into the educational literature. I've often felt that the wholistic perspective which includes the soul, the emotions, the intellect and the whole person is a part of the self-organizing process.

F. I, myself, don't use the term 'soul.' I find it has too much baggage and can be misinterpreted. I use the terms 'consciousness' and 'spirit' but not soul.

B. You have said that in the new paradigm, how you observe something changes what you are observing.

F. Right.

B. If, for instance, you were to change how you observe schools, would that actually bring about changes in the structure of schools?

F. This is a difficult question. I think you're referring to an understanding of cognition in the currently emerging theory of living systems. There is a piece that is called the Santiago Theory of Cognition developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varella. It says that cognition is not a representation of an objectively existing world but is a bringing forth of a world in the process of living. So the process of knowledge or the process of cognition ( that's what it means, the process of knowledge) is a creative process of bringing forth a world. There is no fixed world out there or fixed objects. This is a difficult subject because it does not mean there is nothing there. It means that there are no "things" there with fixed outlines. So, for instance, when we look at a tree we see a certain outline of the tree and we say, "this is a tree"...we draw a picture of the tree and if we did a little test we would find that most of us wouldn't draw the roots...The part above the ground would be larger than the part showing the roots. But in nature, that's not so. The part below the earth is just as large. In fact, in the forest all the trees are interlinked so there is really only one system, only one network, and the trees nourish each other through this network of roots.So who is to say where one tree begins and another tree ends? Then if you take a cat or a deer looking at a tree, they will see different outlines because their sensory apparatus is different. So what's the correct outline of the tree? Is it mine or is it the deer's or the rabbit's?This shows you that what we call an object really depends on how we look at it and how we look at it depends on who we are.But the important thing to recognize is that we don't need to go through this analysis all the time. This is important to understand.... this process of cognition and to understand how cognition is part of all levels of life. Once you have understood that, you can revert back to seeing external objects. You know in the back of your mind there are no really fixed objects but for us, as humans, we all see more or less the same objects. This is important so that we can say, "let's meet at such and such a place at such and such a time." We don't say there really is no such place; we bring it forth together.

B. That is the clearest explanation I have ever heard.

F. There is a famous Zen saying.
Before you study Zen, rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains.While you study Zen rivers are no longer rivers and mountains are no longer mountains.But when you have reached enlightenment rivers are again rivers and mountains are again mountains.The Santiago Theory is similar. Once you have understood it then you can talk again about rivers and mountains. You don't need to go through the cognitive analysis at each step. So I would say in answer to your questions about schools, it doesn't really play a role--that process of cognition.

B. I see. Schools are not objects. We have an organizational mind that is determined by the machine metaphor and that determines how schools are structured. But if we begin to see organizations as living systems then it would begin to change, wouldn't it?

F. Yes, that would play a big role. What we do at the Center for Ecoliteracy we start with Ecology and we say that the great challenge of our times is to create ecological and sustainable communities. Now when you look at nature you see that nature has the inherent capability to sustain life. Life is over 3 billion years old and from the very first cell has continued in this process to the present day without interruption. I think that, in itself, is a fact that people don't appreciate because of our mechanistic biology which makes us believe that when an organism reproduces it sends the genetic material into the new cell. The DNA from the parents splits and recombines and receives the information for creating the new cell. But this is not what happens. This is the mechanistic model. What happens is that the whole cell splits and what is transferred to the next generation is not just the DNA but the entire cellular process. So all the equipment of the cell plus all the processes that take place in the cell go on, without interruption, when the cell divides. It's like dividing an organization. You say, you guys go over there. This will be your organization but you continue to do your business and accounting and meet for lunch all the -processes continue. And then there's another part that goes over to another side and continues the same processes, circulating the same newsletters, etc. doing the same business. With the cell, it is similar. The process applies continuously and has continued for billions of years. This is quite awe-inspiring.

B. So are you saying memory is transmitted this way?

F. I'm not sure about memory. But it's mimetic material.

B. Gregory Bateson speaks of all life having intelligence.

F. I think you can call it memory but I don't know if that statement is metaphoric or not. So nature has an inherent ability to sustain the same life. But what is happening with human industrial society is that we interfere with nature's ability to sustain life. We disrupt the natural cycle, we decimate the biodiversity, we pollute and poison the environment. What we need to do is fundamentally change our technologies, our businesses, our life styles, our institutions, our physical structures so that they do not interfere with this ongoing process of sustaining life.Now in order to do that, the first thing we need to do is to understand what that process is. Because, if we're going to develop technologies that mimic that process, first we need to understand it. This is what I call ecological literacy.

B. So how do you teach this?

F. There's a theoretical part and a practical part. The theoretical part is systems theory because we're talking about eco systems--living systems--and in order to understand the basic principles of ecology and sustainability we need to think systemically...in terms of interconnections, relationships, and context. As for the practical part, we could educate our children so they understand it theoretically but if they don't care about it they would throw away the garbage and not recycle and do other harmful things. So at the Center for Ecoliteracy we're trying to foster both the understanding of nature and the love of nature. We get children out into nature...we help them experience ecology. We help them to gain a sense of place....a sense of belonging as Brother David would say. And in this process we teach them ecology.Now, since ecology is based on systems thinking, this helps also with the rest of education. For example, there are a lot of new insights about learning from neuroscience recently that show that the brain is in a constant search for pattern. The children come to school, not with an empty mind but they come with their own context and they relate everything they hear, that's presented to them, to their own context, searching for meaningful patterns. So the search for patterns and meaning is central to the learning process.And again, to understand this you have to think systemically. Just to understand meaning you have to think systemically. Then this affects the instruction because you would want to have a curriculum that is integrated where these same patterns can be recognized. Then, on the other hand, it affects the process of teaching because if you teach in integrated fashion so that what the geography teacher says is related to what the math teacher says and that's related to what the PE teacher does with the kids, obviously those teachers need to talk with each other and collaborate. This translates into community and, in fact, most of our work to date has been in community building, teaching ecology and systems thinking too, but mostly community building. So we teach ecology, the experience of nature, community building, learning theory and integrated curriculum.

B. And that in itself is all integrated in the process because it's all at the same time.

F. And that hangs together through systems thinking...because those are all interconnected systemically.

B. And, for me, that gives the sense and the spirit, ...the feeling of getting it all together...the sense of being a whole piece of cloth...the feeling that people so desperately seem to be needing now.

F. We've been working in schools for 7 years now and what we're hearing from teachers when we ask what ecoliteracy means for them, is that it has made teaching meaningful again. That's the main reason why they like it.

B. And to me, meaningfulness is soul. That's what we seem to be lacking now.

F. To me, it is connectedness. I define meaning as the experience of context. When you see how something belongs to a larger context and not only understand it intellectually, but when you experience this, then you experience meaning.

B. I was reminded of the Constructivist theory in your description.F. Yes that's what I was describing.....absolutely. And of course you could say that the Santiago Theory is also a Constructivist theory. That fits very well.

B. The metaphors we use seem so important because it is only through metaphors that we seem to make that stretch of understanding we need today.

F. Right.B. In your conversation with Brother David you agree that there is a shift of metaphors from Knowledge as a Building to Knowledge as a Network. For example, you point out that 'God as Architect' has been a metaphor in both Science and Religion. Brother David speaks of the new paradigm in religion as containing "a dialogic dimension of meaning." In other words, "our interaction with God as co-creators of the world." Certainly, in the context of Deep Ecology there is dialogue with nature. In both instances there is a shift from domination and control to dialogue. What Riane Eisler would call partnership. This seems a shift from the prevalence of top/down hierarchy to that of an exchange as in a network... a shift from structure to process which you say is a criteria of the new paradigm thinking in Science. Would you say something about Knowledge as a Network?

F. This goes directly back to the basic question, What is Life? because one of the first insights and still one of the most important insights of the systemic understanding of life is that living systems are networks. Again, I think it is important to point out that we're not talking about network structure, although that's also there. For example, the nervous system is a network structure. It is anatomical. But what we're talking about in an organism is a functional network. So its a network of relationships, a network that interconnects the processes. Then you can ask what are these processes? It depends on the level of life you are looking at. If you look at a cell then the process is a chemical process. If you look at an ecosystem the basic network process is feeding relationships. The animals feed on certain plants, the plants feed on sunlight, the plants die, the insects and the fungi feed on them and we have the whole recycling process. When you come to the human realm--human society or community-- the process is communication. You have language and conversation. I think this is why conversations, such as dialogue, is so important now. When we talk about networking in the human realm we don't talk about exchanging chemicals or eating each other, we talk about communication networks.B. And certainly the internet is playing a big part.

F. Yes, it's an electronic communication network.

B. What I like is that in their websites, people can express their creativity and get it out there so it can be exchanged. I see it as a potential for future education.

F. It is a potential but you have to be careful because the computer industry wants to push computers into elementary and even kindergartens and preschools. That is premature. It has to come in at the appropriate level of development of the child because it requires a certain sense of abstraction. At a young age children are much better off playing and learning in the real world rather than in the virtual reality.

B. I'm interested in the difference between purposeful thinking and playful thinking and particularly in story-telling as a way of communicating playfully in order to find meaning.

F. I have thought a lot about purpose recently. Purpose requires the ability to form mental images. If I go somewhere with a purpose I have something in mind. If I develop a strategy for some purpose I need to be able to have alternatives in mind. This is why plants and lower level animals don't have purpose because they don't have a nervous system and they don't have the ability to form mental images. Once children are able to think in an abstract way then they can act purposefully but at the beginning they act more playfully. Of course there is an interplay between the two. My daughter is now 13 and she acts purposefully but she also likes to act playfully.

B. There is increasing interest in the importance of acting playfully in order to further creativity and meaning.

F. One big theme in the new understanding of life is the understanding of complexity and non-linearity. Purposeful thinking is linear thinking. You zoom in on something linearly whereas the playful thinking is non-linear.

B. I think of playful thinking as being much more systemically oriented. Playfulness seems to allow for the kind of letting go so we can deal with the new paradigm thinking. For example, in new paradigm thinking in Science you say there is a shift from truth to approximate description. Everything we say is limited and approximate yet we act as if there were absolute truths.F. In science we know that but I would say not in experience. You can experience true love for instance and it's not approximate.

B. It is your own experience. But there is dogmatism in both religion and science.

F. I think the expression of experience and the verbal representation of experience can never be absolutely true. It is always approximate. But the experience itself can have this feeling of truth.

B. If you think of representation of experience, in other words, knowledge, as approximate, how do you teach children through tests in the old way of teaching?

F. That's not a contradiction at all. In Science, for example, in classical mechanics, I would give my students a test. For instance, I have an object and I drop it from a certain height and they have to calculate how long it takes for this object to reach the ground. They can do this with certain formulas and equations from Newtonian physics but it is approximate because it does not take into account the air resistance. And if a student asks me, "Should I take this into account?" I can say, "No just forget about it. Let's just do it as if it were in a vacuum." But then I can teach them to refine the formula and add a term for air resistance and then it will again be approximate because the air resistance depends on the weather conditions and son and on.

B. It's a part of the fact that everything is interconnected.

F. Right. I sometimes say everything is interconnected but some things are more interconnected than others. This is where Science comes in. We try to identify the important interconnections and leave out the unimportant. Of course there's a risk of error but that's part of the game.

B. Would that relate to being aware of the shift from objective science to epistemic science in your five criteria for new paradigm thinking in Science?

F. Yes, because the nature of the approximation depends on the human observer, on our epistemology.

B. In your childhood or in your life do you feel there was anything that directed you toward the kind of work you do now?

F. Several things. Something that I have recognized only recently is that my early childhood was spent in the country. I grew up in Austria on a farm and the first 12 years of my life I was on the farm and I walked to school for about three miles through the snow and everything. And most of the summer I went around barefoot and I knew all the trees and all the insects, the birds and plants, the fruits and vegetables that were grown. I think that I acquired my basic sense of ecology in my early childhood. Then later on in my teen-age years I was influenced by a very good mathematics teacher and later still by reading Werner Heisenberg's book, Physics and Philosophy. At that point I had already become very interested in quantum physics.

B. When did you read Heisenberg?

F. Well... at the age of 17... before I went to college.

B. Did your exploration into Eastern mysticism have any effect on your development of The Center for Ecoliteracy? Certainly, your book, The Tao of Physics, has affected many of us.

F. I think that my exploration of mystical tradition gave me my whole outlook on reality, together with my work in science. So, yes, it affects everything I do.

THE IMMUNE SYSTEM OUR SECOND BRAIN

FRITJOF CAPRA

In this column, the author will explore theimplementations of the new understandingof life presented in his book, The Web of Life.
For an outline of this new conceptual framework,see Capra's 1995 lecture at Schumacher College,published in Resurgence 178.

ONE OF THE MOST revolutionary aspects of the emerging systems theory of life is the new conception of mind, or cognition, it implies. This new conception was proposed by Gregory Bateson and elaborated more extensively by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in a theory known as the Santiago theory of cognition.'
The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living systems. In other words, cognition is the very process of life.
It is obvious that we are dealing here with a radical expansion of the concept of cognition and, implicitly, the concept of mind. In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life - including perception, emotion, and behaviour - and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system. At the human level, however, cognition includes language, conceptual thought, and all the other attributes of human consciousness.
The Santiago theory of cognition, in my view, is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and will thus have the most far-reaching implications. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life - the process aspect and the structure aspect. At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure are inseparably connected. Thus, for the first time, we have a scientific theory that unifies mind, matter and life.
Let me illustrate the conceptual advance represented by this unified view with a question that has confused scientists and philosophers for over a hundred years: What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Neuroscientists have known since the nineteenth century that brain structures and mental functions are intimately connected, but the exact relationship between mind and brain always remained a mystery.
In the Santiago theory the relationship between mind and brain is simple and clear. Descartes' characterization of mind as the "thinking thing" (res cogitans) is finally abandoned. Mind is not a thing but a process - the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure.
The brain, moreover, is by no means the only structure involved in the process of cognition. In the human organism, as in the organisms of all vertebrates, the immune system is increasingly being recognized as a network that is as complex and interconnected as the nervous system and serves equally important co-ordinating functions.
Classical immunology sees the immune system as the body's defence system, outwardly directed and often described in terms of military metaphors - armies of white blood cells, generals, soldiers, etc. Recent discoveries by Francisco Varela and his colleagues at the University of Paris are seriously challenging this conception. In fact, some researchers now believe that the classical view with its military metaphors has been one of the main stumbling- blocks in our understanding of auto-immune diseases such as AIDS.
Instead of being concentrated and interconnected through anatomical structures like the nervous system, the immune system is dispersed in the lymph fluid, permeating every single tissue. Its components - a class of cells called lymphocytes, popularly known as white blood cells - move around very rapidly and bind chemically to each other. The lymphocytes are an extremely diverse group of cells. Each type is distinguished by specific molecular markers, called "antibodies", sticking out from their surfaces. The human body contains billions of different types of white blood cell, with an enormous ability to bind chemically to any molecular profile in their environment. According to traditional immunology, the lymphocytes identify an intruding agent, the antibodies attach themselves to it and, by doing so, neutralize it.
Recent research has shown that under normal conditions the antibodies circulating in the body bind to many (if not all) types of cell, including themselves. The entire system looks much more like a net- work, more like people talking to each other, than soldiers looking out for an enemy. Gradually, immunologists have been forced to shift their perception from an immune system to an immune network.
This shift in perception presents a big problem for the classical view. If the immune system is a network whose components bind to each other, and if antibodies are meant to eliminate whatever they bind to, we should all be destroying ourselves. Obviously, we are not.
The immune system seems to be able to distinguish between its own body's cells and foreign agents, between self and non-self. But since, in the classical view, for an antibody to recognize a foreign agent means binding to it chemically and thereby neutralizing it, it remains mysterious how the immune system can recognize its own cells.
Varela and his colleagues argue that the immune system needs to be understood as an autonomous, cognitive network which is responsible for the body's "molecular identity". By interacting with one another and with the other body cells, the lymphocytes continually regulate the number of cells and their molecular profiles. Rather than merely reacting against foreign agents, the immune system serves the important function of regulating the organism's cellular and molecular repertoire.
From the perspective of the Santiago theory, this regulatory function is part of the immune system s process of cognition. When foreign molecules enter the body, the resulting response is not their automatic destruction but regulation of their levels within the system's other cognitive activities. The response will vary and will depend upon the entire context of the network.
When immunologists inject large amounts of a foreign agent into the body, as they do in standard animal experiments, the immune system reacts with the massive defensive response described in the classical theory. However, this is a highly contrived laboratory situation. In its natural surroundings, an animal does not receive large amounts of harmful substances. The small amounts that do enter its body are incorporated naturally into the ongoing regulatory activities of its immune network.
With this understanding of the immune system as a cognitive, self-organizing and self-regulating network, the puzzle of the self/non-self distinction is easily resolved. The immune system simply does not and needs not distinguish between body cells and foreign agents, because both are subject to the same regulatory processes. However, when the invading foreign agents are so massive that they cannot be incorporated into the regulatory network, as for example in the case of infections, they will trigger specific mechanisms in the immune system that mount a defensive response.
The field of "cognitive immunology" is still in its infancy, and the self-organizing properties of immune networks are by no means well understood. However, some of the scientists active in this growing field of research have already begun to speculate about exciting clinical applications to the treatment of auto-immune diseases. Future therapeutic strategies are likely to be based on the understanding that auto- immune diseases reflect a failure in the cognitive operation of the immune network and may involve various novel techniques designed to reinforce the network by boosting its connectivity.
Such techniques, however will require a much deeper understanding of the rich dynamics of immune networks before they can be applied effectively. In the long run, the discoveries of cognitive immunology promise to be tremendously important for the whole field of health and healing. In Varela's opinion, a sophisticated psychosomatic ("mind-body") view of health will not develop until we understand the nervous system and the immune system as two interacting cognitive systems, two "brains" in continuous conversation.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Fritjof Capra

Reflections on the Spirit and Legacy of the Sixties
December 1, 2002
The 1960s were the period of my life during which I experienced the most profound and most radical personal transformation. For those of us who identify with the cultural and political movements of the sixties, that period represents not so much a decade as a state of consciousness, characterized by "transpersonal" expansion, the questioning of authority, a sense of empowerment, and the experience of sensuous beauty and community.
This state of consciousness reached well into the seventies. In fact, one could say that the sixties came to an end only in December 1980, with the shot that killed John Lennon. The immense sense of loss felt by so many of us was, to a great extent, about the loss of an era. For a few days after the fatal shooting we relived the magic of the sixties. We did so in sadness and with tears, but the same feeling of enchantment and of community was once again alive. Wherever you went during those few days — in every neighborhood, every city, every country around the world — you heard John Lennon's music, and the intense idealism that had carried us through the sixties manifested itself once again:
You may say I'm a dreamer,but I'm not the only one.I hope some day you'll join usand the world will live as one.
In this essay, I shall try to evoke the spirit of that remarkable period, identify its defining characteristics, and provide an answer to some questions that are often asked nowadays: What happened to the cultural movements of the sixties? What did they achieve, and what, if any, is their legacy?
expansion of consciousness
The era of the sixties was dominated by an expansion of consciousness in two directions. One movement, in reaction to the increasing materialism and secularism of Western society, embraced a new kind of spirituality akin to the mystical traditions of the East. This involved an expansion of consciousness toward experiences involving nonordinary modes of awareness, which are traditionally achieved through meditation but may also occur in various other contexts, and which psychologists at the time began to call "transpersonal." Psychedelic drugs played a significant role in that movement, as did the human potential movement's promotion of expanded sensory awareness, expressed in its exhortation, "Get out of your head and into your senses!"
The first expansion of consciousness, then, was a movement beyond materialism and toward a new spirituality, beyond ordinary reality via meditative and psychedelic experiences, and beyond rationality through expanded sensory awareness. The combined effect was a continual sense of magic, awe, and wonder that for many of us will forever be associated with the sixties.
questioning of authority
The other movement was an expansion of social consciousness, triggered by a radical questioning of authority. This happened independently in several areas. While the American civil rights movement demanded that Black citizens be included in the political process, the free speech movement at Berkeley and student movements at other universities throughout the United States and Europe demanded the same for students.
In Europe, these movements culminated in the memorable revolt of French university students that is still known simply as "May '68." During that time, all research and teaching activities came to a complete halt at most French universities when the students, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, extended their critique to society as a whole and sought the solidarity of the French labor movement to change the entire social order. For three weeks, the administrations of Paris and other French cities, public transport, and businesses of every kind were paralyzed by a general strike. In Paris, people spent most of their time discussing politics in the streets, while the students held strategic discussions at the Sorbonne and other universities. In addition, they occupied the Odéon, the spacious theater of the Comédie Française, and transformed it into a twenty-four-hour "people's parliament," where they discussed their stimulating, albeit highly idealistic, visions of a future social order.
1968 was also the year of the celebrated "Prague Spring," during which Czech citizens, led by Alexander Dubcek, questioned the authority of the Soviet regime, which alarmed the Soviet Communist party to such an extent that, a few months later, it crushed the democratization processes initiated in Prague in its brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In the United States, opposition to the Vietnam war became a political rallying point for the student movement and the counterculture. It sparked a huge anti-war movement, which exerted a major influence on the American political scene and led to many memorable events, including the decision by President Johnson not to seek reelection, the turbulent 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Watergate scandal, and the resignation of President Nixon.
a new sense of community
While the civil rights movement questioned the authority of white society and the student movements questioned the authority of their universities on political issues, the women's movement began to question patriarchal authority; humanistic psychologists undermined the authority of doctors and therapists; and the sexual revolution, triggered by the availability of birth control pills, broke down the puritan attitudes toward sexuality that were typical of American culture.
The radical questioning of authority and the expansion of social and transpersonal consciousness gave rise to a whole new culture — a "counterculture" — that defined itself in opposition to the dominant "straight" culture by embracing a different set of values. The members of this alternative culture, who were called "hippies" by outsiders but rarely used that term themselves, were held together by a strong sense of community. To distinguish ourselves from the crew cuts and polyester suits of that era's business executives, we wore long hair, colorful and individualistic clothes, flowers, beads, and other jewelry. Many of us were vegetarians who often baked our own bread, practiced yoga or some other form of meditation, and learned to work with our hands in various crafts.
Our subculture was immediately identifiable and tightly bound together. It had its own rituals, music, poetry, and literature; a common fascination with spirituality and the occult; and the shared vision of a peaceful and beautiful society. Rock music and psychedelic drugs were powerful bonds that strongly influenced the art and lifestyle of the hippie culture. In addition, the closeness, peacefulness, and trust of the hippie communities were expressed in casual communal nudity and freely shared sexuality. In our homes we would frequently burn incense and keep little altars with eclectic collections of statues of Indian gods and goddesses, meditating Buddhas, yarrow stalks or coins for consulting the I Ching, and various personal "sacred" objects.
Although different branches of the sixties movement arose independently and often remained distinct movements with little overlap for several years, they eventually became aware of one another, expressed mutual solidarity, and, during the 1970s, merged more or less into a single subculture. By that time, psychedelic drugs, rock music, and the hippie fashion had transcended national boundaries and had forged strong ties among the international counterculture. Multinational hippie tribes gathered in several countercultural centers — London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Greenwich Village — as well as in more remote and exotic cities like Marrakech and Katmandu. These frequent cross-cultural exchanges gave rise to an "alternative global awareness" long before the onset of economic globalization.
the sixties' music
The zeitgeist of the sixties found expression in many art forms that often involved radical innovations, absorbed various facets of the counterculture, and strengthened the multiple relationships among the international alternative community.
Rock music was the strongest among these artistic bonds. The Beatles broke down the authority of studios and songwriters by writing their own music and lyrics, creating new musical genres, and setting up their own production company. While doing so, they incorporated many facets of the period's characteristic expansion of consciousness into their songs and lifestyles.
Bob Dylan expressed the spirit of the political protests in powerful poetry and music that became anthems of the sixties. The Rolling Stones represented the counterculture's irreverence, exuberance, and sexual energy, while San Francisco's "acid rock" scene gave expression to its psychedelic experiences.
At the same time, the "free jazz" of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and others shattered conventional forms of jazz improvisation and gave expression to spirituality, radical political poetry, street theater, and other elements of the counterculture. Like the jazz musicians, classical composers, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany and John Cage in the United States, broke down conventional musical forms and incorporated much of the sixties' spontaneity and expanded awareness into their music.
The fascination of the hippies with Indian religious philosophies, art, and culture led to a great popularity of Indian music. Most record collections in those days contained albums of Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, and other masters of classical Indian music along with rock and folk music, jazz and blues.
The rock and drug culture of the sixties found its visual expressions in the psychedelic posters of the era's legendary rock concerts, especially in San Francisco, and in album covers of ever increasing sophistication, which became lasting icons of the sixties' subculture. Many rock concerts also featured "light shows" — a novel form of psychedelic art in which images of multicolored, pulsating, and ever changing shapes were projected onto walls and ceilings. Together with the loud rock music, these visual images created highly effective simulations of psychedelic experiences.
new literary forms
The main expressions of sixties' poetry were in the lyrics of rock and folk music. In addition, the "beat poetry" of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and others, which had originated a decade earlier and shared many characteristics with the sixties' art forms, remained popular in the counterculture.
One of the major new literary forms was the "magical realism" of Latin American literature. In their short stories and novels, writers like Jorges Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez blended descriptions of realistic scenes with fantastic and dreamlike elements, metaphysical allegories, and mythical images. This was a perfect genre for the counterculture's fascination with altered states of consciousness and pervasive sense of magic.
In addition to the Latin American magical realism, science fiction, especially the complex series of Dune novels by Frank Herbert, exerted great fascination on the sixties' youth, as did the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut. Many of us also turned to literary works of the past, such as the romantic novels of Hermann Hesse, in which we saw reflections of our own experiences.
Of equal, if not greater, popularity were the semi-fictional shamanistic writings of Carlos Castaneda, which satisfied the hippies' yearning for spirituality and "separate realities" mediated by psychedelic drugs. In addition, the dramatic encounters between Carlos and the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan symbolized in a powerful way the clashes between the rational approach of modern industrial societies and the wisdom of traditional cultures.
film and the performing arts
In the sixties, the performing arts experienced radical innovations that broke every imaginable tradition of theater and dance. In fact, in companies like the Living Theater, the Judson Dance Theater, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, theater and dance were often fused and combined with other forms of art. The performances involved trained actors and dancers as well as visual artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, and even members of the audience.
Men and women often enjoyed equal status; nudity was frequent. Performances, often with strong political content, took place not only in theaters but also in museums, churches, parks, and in the streets. All these elements combined to create the dramatic expansion of experience and strong sense of community that was typical of the counterculture.
Film, too, was an important medium for expressing the zeitgeist of the sixties. Like the performing artists, the sixties' filmmakers, beginning with the pioneers of the French New Wave cinema, broke with the traditional techniques of their art, introducing multi-media approaches, often abandoning narratives altogether, and using their films to give a powerful voice to social critique.
With their innovative styles, these filmmakers expressed many key characteristics of the counterculture. For example, we can find the sixties' irreverence and political protest in the films of Godard; the questioning of materialism and a pervasive sense of alienation in Antonioni; questioning of the social order and transcendence of ordinary reality in Fellini; the exposure of class hypocrisy in Buñuel; social critique and utopian visions in Kubrik; the breaking down of sexual and gender stereotypes in Warhol; and the portrayal of altered states of consciousness in the works of experimental filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and John Whitney. In addition, the films of these directors are characterized by a strong sense of magical realism.
the legacy of the sixties
Many of the cultural expressions that were radical and subversive in the sixties have been accepted by broad segments of mainstream culture during the subsequent three decades. Examples would be the long hair and sixties fashion, the practice of Eastern forms of meditation and spirituality, recreational use of marijuana, increased sexual freedom, rejection of sexual and gender stereotypes, and the use of rock (and more recently rap) music to express alternative cultural values. All of these were once expressions of the counterculture that were ridiculed, suppressed, and even persecuted by the dominant mainstream society.
Beyond these contemporary expressions of values and esthetics that were shared by the sixties' counterculture, the most important and enduring legacy of that era has been the creation and subsequent flourishing of a global alternative culture that shares a set of core values. Although many of these values — e.g. environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, global justice — were shaped by cultural movements in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, their essential core was first expressed by the sixties' counterculture. In addition, many of today's senior progressive political activists, writers, and community leaders trace the roots of their original inspiration back to the sixties.
Green politics
In the sixties we questioned the dominant society and lived according to different values, but we did not formulate our critique in a coherent, systematic way. We did have concrete criticisms on single issues, such as the Vietnam war, but we did not develop any comprehensive alternative system of values and ideas. Our critique was based on intuitive feeling; we lived and embodied our protest rather than verbalizing and systematizing it.
The seventies brought consolidation of our views. As the magic of the sixties gradually faded, the initial excitement gave way to a period of focusing, digesting, and integrating. Two new cultural movements, the ecology movement and the feminist movement, emerged during the seventies and together provided the much-needed broad framework for our critique and alternative ideas.
The European student movement, which was largely Marxist oriented, was not able to turn its idealistic visions into realities during the sixties. But it kept its social concerns alive during the subsequent decade, while many of its members went through profound personal transformations. Influenced by the two major political themes of the seventies, feminism and ecology, these members of the "new left" broadened their horizons without losing their social consciousness. At the end of the decade, many of them became the leaders of transformed socialist parties. In Germany, these "young socialists" formed coalitions with ecologists, feminists, and peace activists, out of which emerged the Green Party — a new political party whose members confidently declared: "We are neither left nor right; we are in front."
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Green movement became a permanent feature of the European political landscape, and Greens now hold seats in numerous national and regional parliaments around the world. They are the political embodiment of the core values of the sixties.
the end of the Cold War
During the 1970s and 1980s, the American anti-war movement expanded into the anti-nuclear and peace movements, in solidarity with corresponding movements in Europe, especially those in the UK and West Germany. This, in turn, sparked a powerful peace movement in East Germany, led by the Protestant churches, which maintained regular contacts with the West German peace movement, and in particular with Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the German Greens.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, he was well aware of the strength of the Western peace movement and accepted our argument that a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. This realization played an important part in Gorbachev's "new thinking" and his restructuring (perestroika) of the Soviet regime, which would lead, eventually, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the end of Soviet Communism.
All social and political systems are highly nonlinear and do not lend themselves to being analyzed in terms of linear chains of cause and effect. Nevertheless, careful study of our recent history shows that the key ingredient in creating the climate that led to the end of the Cold War was not the hard-line strategy of the Reagan administration, as the conservative mythology would have it, but the international peace movement. This movement clearly had its political and cultural roots in the student movements and counterculture of the sixties.
the information technology revolution
The last decade of the twentieth century brought a global phenomenon that took most cultural observers by surprise. A new world emerged, shaped by new technologies, new social structures, a new economy, and a new culture. "Globalization" became the term used to summarize the extraordinary changes and the seemingly irresistible momentum that were now felt by millions of people.
A common characteristic of the multiple aspects of globalization is a global information and communications network based on revolutionary new technologies. The information technology revolution is the result of a complex dynamic of technological and human interactions, which produced synergistic effects in three major areas of electronics — computers, microelectronics, and telecommunications. The key innovations that created the radically new electronic environment of the 1990s all took place 20 years earlier, during the 1970s.
It may be surprising to many that, like so many other recent cultural movements, the information technology revolution has important roots in the sixties' counterculture. It was triggered by a dramatic technological development — a shift from data storage and processing in large, isolated machines to the interactive use of microcomputers and the sharing of computer power in electronic networks. This shift was spearheaded by young technology enthusiasts who embraced many aspects of the counterculture, which was still very much alive at that time.
The first commercially successful microcomputer was built in 1976 by two college dropouts, Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs, in their now legendary garage in Silicon Valley. These young innovators and others like them brought the irreverent attitudes, freewheeling lifestyles, and strong sense of community they had adopted in the counterculture to their working environments. In doing so, they created the relatively informal, open, decentralized, and cooperative working styles that became characteristic of the new information technologies.
global capitalism
However, the ideals of the young technology pioneers of the seventies were not reflected in the new global economy that emerged from the information technology revolution 20 years later. On the contrary, what emerged was a new materialism, excessive corporate greed, and a dramatic rise of unethical behavior among our corporate and political leaders. These harmful and destructive attitudes are direct consequences of a new form of global capitalism, structured largely around electronic networks of financial and informational flows. The so-called "global market" is a network of machines programmed according to the fundamental principle that money-making should take precedence over human rights, democracy, environmental protection, or any other value.
Since the new economy is organized according to this quintessential capitalist principle, it is not surprising that it has produced a multitude of interconnected harmful consequences that are in sharp contradiction to the ideals of the global Green movement: rising social inequality and social exclusion, a breakdown of democracy, more rapid and extensive deterioration of the natural environment, and increasing poverty and alienation. The new global capitalism has threatened and destroyed local communities around the world; and with the pursuit of an ill-conceived biotechnology, it has invaded the sanctity of life by attempting to turn diversity into monoculture, ecology into engineering, and life itself into a commodity.
It has become increasingly clear that global capitalism in its present form is unsustainable and needs to be fundamentally redesigned. Indeed, scholars, community leaders, and grassroots activists around the world are now raising their voices, demanding that we must "change the game" and suggesting concrete ways of doing so.
the global civil society
At the turn of this century, an impressive global coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many of them led by men and women with deep personal roots in the sixties, formed around the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability. In 1999, hundreds of these grassroots organizations interlinked electronically for several months to prepare for joint protest actions at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. The "Seattle Coalition," as it is now called, was extremely successful in derailing the WTO meeting and in making its views known to the world. Its concerted actions have permanently changed the political climate around the issue of economic globalization.
Since that time, the Seattle Coalition, or "global justice movement," has not only organized further protests but has also held several World Social Forum meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil. At the second of these meetings, the NGOs proposed a whole set of alternative trade policies, including concrete and radical proposals for restructuring global financial institutions, which would profoundly change the nature of globalization.
The global justice movement exemplifies a new kind of political movement that is typical of our Information Age. Because of their skillful use of the Internet, the NGOs in the coalition are able to network with each other, share information, and mobilize their members with unprecedented speed. As a result, the new global NGOs have emerged as effective political actors who are independent of traditional national or international institutions. They constitute a new kind of global civil society.
This new form of alternative global community, sharing core values and making extensive use of electronic networks in addition to frequent human contacts, is one of the most important legacies of the sixties. If it succeeds in reshaping economic globalization so as to make it compatible with the values of human dignity and ecological sustainability, the dreams of the "sixties revolution" will have been realized:
Imagine no possessions,I wonder if you can,no need for greed or hunger,a brotherhood of man.Imagine all the peoplesharing all the world...You may say I'm a dreamer,but I'm not the only one.I hope some day you'll join usand the world will live as one.