Welcome to the mind(14)
时间:2008-01-23 11:37来源:Psychology Today,Vol.26 No.4,J作者:Marc Bar… 点击:
a Zen meditation cushion and also taught for three years at an
institute run by Catholic mystic Father Matthew Fox. Rubik, a
well-regarded hard scientist, recently attended a White House
meeting on health care in her capacity as advisor to the NIH Office
of Alternative Medicine, where she heads a panel on "electromagnetic
interventions." The panel will examine everything from electrical
therapies used to accelerate bone healing to a "neurobiochemical
stimulator" (which, she says, "has created profound changes in
animals' brain chemistry and moods"). Her passion, she says, is "how
energy fields--maybe including a nonlocal field of consciousness
itself--interact with life."
Like a number of her Causality Project colleagues, Rubik feels her
various spiritual sojourns have given her an inside track on the
mind-brain puzzle. Her accounting makes it sound as if Descartes,
last seen at his recent, merciful public interment, may yet shake
off the clods of soil to meander among the scientific living. "I
agree Cartesianism is dreadful," she muses, "but there is something
immaterial about who we are. Maybe we'll need to go back to Eastern
mystical concepts like an 'etheric' or 'astral' energy domain."
Clearly, these ideas--particularly as they emerge from the belly of
what looks suspiciously like a new-age Trojan Horse wheeled in
sometime around the dawn of Aquarius--will irritate some
sensibilities. "Media Blitz for Mind/Body Malarkey" blared a recent
headline in a scientific-muckraking newsletter called Probe. The
article took aim at what it held to be the moonier aspects of
Moyers' TV series, which it called "seductively anti-medical,
anti-scientific, and anti-rational." Its claim that "a campaign has
been launched to radically change and spiritualize America's
science-based medicine" received wide press coverage.
"It's not as if anyone's saying science is completely wrong,"
counters Beverly Rubik. "Conventional science is appropriate within
a conventional framework. But there can be other sciences which
exist outside of that box. We need multiple ways of inquiry that
accord with--and I realize this will sound odd--our levels of being.
Our usual practice of science is based on the lowest common
denominator of human consciousness: of feeling separated from the
rest of universe.
"What's missing," she says, "is attention to the inner state of the
investigator. We've been pretending we're neutral, playing dead,