12

Science, Consciousness,
and Public Policy

"Developing consciousness is the cornerstone of the Natural Law Party's platform. This is because America's problems are human problems-crime, domestic violence, drug abuse, and declining health in the face of an epidemic of unhealthy habits. The way to uplift human behavior is not through legislation regulating details of peoples' lives. You can't have police in every home, playground, business, and classroom.

Instead, the way to elevate human behavior is through education that expands creativity and intelligence and brings broad comprehension; education that harnesses America's most precious resource-human consciousness-and brings life into harmony with natural law, empowering people to govern their own lives better, so they create fewer mistakes and fewer problems for themselves and others, and lead healthier, more productive, more satisfying lives." - John Hagelin

I studied the social sciences and journalism as a university undergraduate in preparation for a career I imagined would be spent largely in politics. I never could have predicted at the time that when I went to work with a political party that I would have a fluency in quantum mechanics and an understanding of theories of consciousness as well. After nearly six years with the Natural Law Party, following John Hagelin all over the country, I now have both.

We have a completely new world view today that has overturned the Newtonian model that was in place at the time of the American Revolution. And while, just as in Newton's time, exciting new worlds are opening up at a faster and faster pace, these worlds reveal not only the unfathomable diversity on the surface of life but also the unfathomable unity that lies within.

Physics began as a march inward to discover the ultimate building blocks of nature-the discrete, foundational, material cornerstones upon which everything rests. Instead, physics found not concrete matter, not atom-like particles at the basis of everything, but underlying fields, whose wave-like excitations constitute all "matter," all energy, all life. Discoveries of these fundamental fields and their applications through technology have completely transformed society, giving rise to modern electronic, communications, laser, and nuclear technologies.

But such discoveries are also transforming our understanding of who we are-of our mind, of our consciousness, of our place in the cosmopolis. What is consciousness-and what does it have to do with a political party?

John Hagelin is certainly qualified to answer that question.

First some background: John Hagelin was born on June 9, 1954, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut. He was at the top of his class at the Taft School for Boys and tallied the highest possible score on the school's IQ test-a genius 165. His success at Taft propelled him to Dartmouth and launched him into the life of a research scientist. After just three years, he graduated with highest honors in physics, and co-authored and published a highly praised independent study in physics. He won a fellowship for graduate study at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in particle physics. At Harvard, predictions made by Hagelin in his doctoral research continue to be verified today. He is widely recognized as 'one of the world's experts' in the behavior of certain elementary particles, according to his doctoral advisor, Howard Georgi.

Hagelin continued to pursue physics with a passion, winning post-doctoral positions at two of the world's most prestigious research institutions, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California, and the European Center for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1984, he accepted a post as head of the physics department at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.¹ He did this, he said, motivated by his deep interest in developing human consciousness and convinced that the most advanced unified field research could take place there. His physics career flourished. He was the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation research grant on unified field theories, and he co-developed, with physicists at other universities, a highly successful theory that unifies the fundamental forces and particles of nature. His 60 published research articles (e.g., "Weak symmetry breaking by radiative corrections in broken symmetry") include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences, according to Current Contents magazine.² His longstanding concern over social problems also prompted him to found the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy-a think-tank at the University for seeking out, researching, and implementing innovative, scientifically proven solutions to America's social, and economic, and environmental problems.

John Hagelin can talk with expertise about a vast range of issues, from nuclear power and genetic engineering to election law reform and weapons of mass destruction. But his real expertise is in the cutting-edge knowledge of quantum physics, as well as how it sheds light on the understanding of human consciousness. Specifically, what consciousness is and why it is so central to the Natural Law Party's platform. Given the time, Hagelin will talk about it in depth on the campaign trail, even though it doesn't always fit neatly into a soundbite format. And from what I've seen, no one glazes over, no one gets lost-not even the press. That's because Hagelin makes the issue simple and straightforward, and because, it turns out, the issue is highly relevant to public policy. In fact, the Natural Law Party believes that human consciousness is the most crucial issue in its platform because conciousness is the most valuable resource we have as a nation. It is the untapped creativity and intelligence of 260 million citizens. By better understanding that resource, and by learning to harness it naturally, Hagelin believes that we can solve many, if not all, of our problems.

October 7, 1992.   John Hagelin is back at his alma mater, Harvard, for a very important lecture date. He is here not as a physicist, but as a presidential candidate in his first run for President, speaking at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Hagelin is a featured speaker in a series on American democracy. The hall-theater-style seats up a steep incline-is jammed with several hundred students, faculty, and staff. He stands behind a spare podium on a stark wooden stage with a dark blue curtain behind him. He opens his talk with a broad brush stroke, introducing the usual basic platform points of the Natural Law Party, e.g., what the Party stands for in health care, crime, education foreign policy, energy, etc. And then he suddenly shifts gears.

"The uniqueness of the Natural Law Party is that we are a party of deep scientific principles. Unfortunately, we don't always have an opportunity to present this knowledge, especially in a two- or three-minute soundbite. Tonight, however, I want to explain some of the deepest principles that underlie this party-principles that inform all our various policy planks. Specifically, I want to talk about the central role of human consciousness in public policy."

Hagelin knows that consciousness is a confusing term, both in academic circles as well as for the general public. Say it to some people and they'll think you're talking about "consciousness-raising" on an issue debated in the news. Others will think you mean someone was unconscious, and now he's awake. Others will assume you mean developing your inner creative potential.

The reason there's no clear consensus on consciousness is that most of us, including most scientists, have been using the wrong model, Hagelin says.

"For 300 hundred years scientists studied inert matter as the ultimate reality-the building of blocks, of life," he says. "On this material basis they constructed models of consciousness. Human intelligence or consciousness was, and in most circles still is, perceived as entirely a byproduct, or epiphenomenon, of brain functioning-the macroscopic outcome of numerous microscopic electro-chemical processes in the brain."

This means that consciousness has been seen, essentially, as nothing. You can't develop consciousness because there is nothing there to develop. This material, mechanistic model concludes that an individual's intelligence is basically fixed by genetics-fixed at birth.

"This purely materialistic view is woefully out of date," Hagelin says. "As lay scientists, we are trained to see atoms and molecules as matter,-miniature solar systems with electrons orbiting the nucleus. But that picture doesn't work. It was abandoned in the early 1900s because it failed to explain anything about atoms. Quantum mechanics took its place and has proven to be highly successful. But quantum mechanics has something rather radical to tell us about the foundation of the universe: There is no matter down there. Instead of a material electron, you have an 'electron wave function.' But a wave function is just a concept. It's the potentiality for an electron to exist, and that's all there is at the quantum mechanical level: pure potentiality. The deeper you go in the exploration of nature, the more tenuous nature becomes. The more you try to grab onto the substance of what's down there, the more it slips through your fingers. Because it is not a 'thing' at all, it is a notion."

Hagelin says that those "notions" constitute the four fundamental fields-gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. Underlying those four fields is the unified field of natural law-the source of all forms and phenomena in the universe, including you and me.

"We have learned that the unified field pervades everything, gives rise to everything-not just the nature that we see outside of us, but our innermost nature as well. We're not separate from nature, we're part of nature, and we share, if we go deeply enough, that same universal field that pervades everything."³

Hagelin says that our material body contains the same fundamental atoms and molecules-and is governed by the same fundamental laws-that govern the universe. In the same way, our intelligence, or consciousness, shares the same unified field of intelligence that governs the whole of nature. Our individual consciousness is like a wave in the ocean of nature's intelligence.

Hagelin has been on the cutting edge of this research for 20 years. He has brought together some of the best minds in physics to analyze these parallels. He has authored many scientific studies on the connections between consciousness and the unified field, addressed critical audiences at hundreds of university physics departments internationally, and has written a book for government leaders and their science advisors, entitled Manual for a Perfect Government: How to Harness the Laws of Nature to Bring Maximum Success to Governmental Administration.

And as novel as it may seem at first, this understanding is not a new one among many scientists and physicists who share a deep grasp of nature's functioning. In fact, in the early 1900s, Sir Arthur Eddington, the great English physicist, who is one of the fathers of quantum physics, was among the first to appreciate the inherently subjective nature of the deepest levels of nature's functioning, when he said, "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our own consciousness."

Hagelin says that it's striking how the deeper structure of intelligence reflected in the human mind and consciousness precisely mirrors the deeper, quantum-mechanical levels of intelligence seen in nature.

"Scientists have long been amazed at how the logical structure of the mind, which takes its most concrete shape in the various mathematical formalisms and theories developed over the past several centuries, precisely mirrors the intelligence displayed throughout nature," he says. "These logical, mathematical structures, spawned by the human mind, seem to fit nature like a glove."

Physicist Eugene Wigner, honored as the "Father of the Atomic Age," marveled at what he called the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences." For Einstein, "the eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility" by the mind.

For Hagelin, the fundamental connection between consciousness and the unified field can best be understood through the integration of ancient and modern science.

"There are profound traditions of knowledge, dating back thousands of years, that offer an expanded physical framework for consciousness. Until the advent of quantum mechanics, this ancient knowledge remained virtually indecipherable. But now, in light of recent scientific discoveries, these ancient descriptions make sense. They describe consciousness as a universal field of intelligence underlying the whole of material creation.

"You can look with great mathematical precision and find that the deepest structure of human intelligence-as codified in modern mathematics and described in great detail in the ancient Vedic texts,⁴ for example-exactly mirrors the structure of nature's intelligence displayed in the laws governing the physical universe-especially at the quantum mechanical level. One is drawn to conclude that the unified field of physics and the field of consciousness are one."⁵

For Hagelin this is more than an abstract academic exercise. He points out that these ancient traditions offer procedures that access and apply this field of consciousness in daily life. Some of these procedures are being used today in the workplace to improve productivity, in schools to boost creativity, and prescribed by doctors to reduce stress.

A student asks for specifics.

"I'm referring to systematic, scientific programs of meditation and self-development," Hagelin says. "The program with the most research is the Transcendental Meditation program of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-a nonreligious, nonphilosophical procedure for reducing stress, promoting health, and increasing creativity and intelligence. The Natural Law Party would support any procedure that has been proven through extensive research to develop human consciousness."

I look around the room. Meditation is quite mainstream in America today, and most everyone is familiar with the TM technique, but nonetheless there are a few surprised looks. You don't find meditation in too many political platforms. Hagelin has seen these looks before. He explains.

"More than 600 studies have been conducted on the effects of the TM technique at over 200 independent universities and research institutions during the past 30 years, including Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA Medical School. The National Institutes of Health have given several million dollars to research the technique's effects on reducing high blood pressure and preventing heart disease. It's prescribed widely by medical doctors, used in some of America's largest corporations, and offered in hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, and prisons to help solve problems that nothing else has been able to solve. These are the kinds of applications-and that is the kind of scientific track record-that merits consideration for public policy. As research on other programs demonstrates their effectiveness, those programs will be incorporated into the platform as well."

Since John Hagelin spoke at Harvard back in 1992, he has given this talk many hundreds of times. And just as very few people know much about the role third parties can play in a democracy, so too, few people know how programs that develop consciousness-our most precious resource-can be used, for example, in highly-stressed, violence-scarred communities to improve health, learning ability, self-esteem, relationships, and society as a whole. So when reporters ask why such programs are in the platform-which they inevitably do-I tell them the following stories about the use of TM in our inner cities. Those stories answer their questions better than I ever could.