HEAD AND HEART

Victor Mansfield is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Colgate University, where he also teaches courses on Tibetan Buddhism and Jungian psychology. This book follows on from his earlier one Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making, which I remember reading on a balcony in Hong Kong! Accurately subtitled 'a personal exploration of science and the sacred', the book fully lives up to its title by interweaving informed discussion of technical issues with insights gained from personal experiences and interactions. All this is enhanced by the many black and white photos of people, places and events featured in the text.

The first part differentiates between scientific and sacred or 'transformative self-knowledge', beginning with the story of the wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle as a parable for bringing together head and heart, yang and yin, rationality and intuition. This means making room for the synchronistic universe of meaning within the rational scientific framework and acknowledging that reality 'cannot be completely comprehended by the head'. Vic provides a very useful framework for understanding transformative self-knowledge when he characterises it as primarily an interior intuition, holistic, particular, transforming, unrepeatable, teleological and sacred. By contrast scientific knowledge is not primarily an interior intuition – it must be repeatable, public knowledge and is often articulated in a mathematical form. It is not unique to the individual, nor is it necessarily transforming, although it can be sacred even while denying teleology or purpose. My only quibble here is when Vic suggests that scientific knowledge is not holistic – he is right if holistic is defined as representing the whole being but not if it differentiates approaches based on holism as contrasted with reductionism – for instance in biology. The next chapter develops a cosmological analogy for the soul, which is later developed into one of the most significant themes of the book. Taking Plotinus as his starting point, Vic explains Plotinus's view that the soul has both a unitive and a divisible aspect, and that neither aspect can be fully understood without the other. As he remarks, we can distinguish these two aspects but we cannot separate them. This framework enables him to make sense of synchronistic events and to put forward a novel theory for astrology based on two orders. The first is reproducible acausal orderedness to be found in various quantum and parapsychological phenomena as well as astrology without meaning, while the second is inconstant, nonreproducible synchronicity. The first type can be accommodated within an extended science but the second is by definition subjective – all this is discussed in detail. In a section on interactions between science and the sacred that brings up these questions relating to synchronicity and astrology. Vic also observes that science has inherited some totalitarian tendencies from monotheism, which helps to explain why some phenomena are dismissed out of hand in ways that are less than wholly rational. Certain dogmas are held to be inviolable, so that any evidence to the contrary can be safely dismissed. These commonly include homeopathy, parapsychology and astrology. Vic uses both Newtonian and Synchronistic explanations to describe a dramatic accident where he hurled through the air by a car while on his way to a lecture. The deterministic picture gives us an insight into the physical side of the event but has nothing to say about its subjective significance. For Vic, both stories are vital. In the last part of the book, Vic discusses how science and the sacred may come into harmony. The starting point is the realisation that 'consciousness is never an object of knowledge, never known in an objective manner like other items of our experience'. Moreover, 'in the very act of knowing, we are aware that we are knowing', hence we must distinguish between consciousness and its neural correlates. This does not mean for Vic that consciousness collapses the wave function, and he devotes a few illuminating pages to this issue. This leads on to a larger discussion about the harmony of opposites, which brings us back to the book's title, a harmony beautifully illustrated in the life and work of the primatologist Jane Goodall. The final chapter evokes the images of the pilgrim and the prodigal, describing significant journeys to India and Catalonia, where Vic visited Fr. Raimon Panikkar, a thinker who has always stood for dialogue. Vic concludes that a genuine dialogue between science and the sacred cannot be based on the superiority of one over the other, just as we would not claim that the head is superior to the heart or vice-versa. This brings him back to Plotinus where 'from the perspective of the indivisible, unchanging or infinite aspect of the soul, all pairs of opposites are aspects of the soul's unity'. Vic has written a bold and accessible book in which he shows how he has tried to integrate head and heart in his own life and challenges readers to do likewise. The book shares the 2002 Network Book Prize.