BEING AND BIOLOGY

This book must have been one of the last editing jobs of the late Robert (Bob) Jahn, who died last year after a long and distinguished career in which he and Brenda Dunne set up the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) and undertook decades of significant laboratory work on PK and precognition with statistically significant results as initially described in their book Margins of Reality, which I reviewed in 1990 in Newsletter 43! Bob stood out for his courage and integrity in pursuing his work in the teeth of institutional opposition at Princeton, including from Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson, who I understood refused even to visit the lab and look at the results.

This volume brings together a number of distinguished contributors to consider the relationship between consciousness and the life force. The influence of Henri Bergson's book Creative Evolution (1911) with his concept of elan vital is apparent in a number of essays and it resembles what we would now call self-organisation. The editors point out that Lamarck had similar thoughts 100 years previously, although he has been denigrated by conventional biologists until the recent advent of epigenetics. They report his claim that organisms tend to evolve towards complexity through behavioural adaptation, also foreshadowing Teilhard de Chardin. In his brilliant and wide-ranging essay, Vasileios Basios restates Bergson's thesis by pointing out that life = creativity.

The central dogma in biology forgot this simple point, making the gene and DNA into the elementary particles of biology and assuming a one-way process from DNA>RNA>Proteins>Function, which has been overtaken by complexity theory demonstrating non-linear information flows including epigenetics where lifestyle factors are capable of activating ('switching on') certain genes. However, the Kuhnian revolution in the light of complexity still has some way to go in the biological community still dominated by linear and mechanistic thinking. Vitalists were vanquished by mechanists in the 1920s, but it is interesting to read Niels Bohr's view in Life and Light (published in Nature) that they in fact represent a complementarity. The overall argument of this book speaks for the restoration of some of its insights within a framework of unbroken or undivided wholeness as advanced by David Bohm and Basil Hiley. Vasili adds some pertinent remarks on quantum logic in the light of complementarity and also brings in the work of Emilios Bouratinos on self-releasing objectifications as opposed to self-locking objectifications where scientists are trapped in their own formalisms and the contents of their consciousness – without realising that we need an inside-out science within consciousness, not just an outside-in consciousness within science.

The volume contains a wide range of theoretical and experimental contributions, some on the life force, bioenergy and orgone while others propose new approaches involving water, light and sound. Rupert Sheldrake provides an elegant and lucid critique of a gene-centred approach in his essay on evolution and formative causation, linking this with top-down epigenetic causation in terms of higher level patterns. Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vannini explain their syntropic model of consciousness while Yolene Thomas gives an update on the work of Jacques Benveniste as it has developed into digital biology. Rollin McCraty from HeartMath usefully distinguishes three forms of intuition: implicit knowledge from the unconscious mind, energetic sensitivity to environmental signals such as electromagnetic and biofields, and finally nonlocal intuition as in telepathy and based on inherent interconnectedness; he also reports that the heart seems to receive pre-stimulus information in pre-sponse experiments about 1.3 seconds before the brain – an intriguing finding.

Another indication of interconnectedness is examined by William Bengston in his report on experiments involving healing cancerous mice. Some of his significant findings indicate that healing proceeds in a non-linear fashion and appears to be about information rather than energy. Healers and healees are not consciously aware of any connection and healing seems to be activated by need, and students involved in experiments resonantly connected with the mice and could apparently heal them; moreover, awareness seems to be more important than intention, suggesting the efficacy of a non-directed approach, as also noted by Larry Dossey in his work on prayer. Larry contributes an essay including distant mental interactions with living systems and telesomatic phenomena. He also looks at cell-to-cell, brain-to-brain and person-to-person connections, all of which points to a fundamental nonlocal interconnectedness acknowledged in physics but as yet not in biology or medicine; also to the undeniable irreducibility of consciousness as proposed not only by Planck and Schroedinger but also more recently by David Chalmers and Christof Koch.

Readers of this journal are likely to be already sympathetic to the slant and message of this book but will find a good deal of new and stimulating new thinking in this important contribution to the debate about the relationship between life and consciousness. It is also interesting to see how neglected figures such as Lamarck and Bergson can reappear as influences at a new level of the conceptual developmental spiral having previously fallen out of favour.