According to Dr Deepak Chopra, a physician and philosopher of holistic health, the global crises we now face are evidence of a more deeply rooted crisis of perception. A former chief-of-staff at Boston Regional Medical Center specialising in endocrinology, in his mid-30s Chopra smoked excessively and drank too much coffee and alcohol to cope with the stresses of being a doctor. But a turning point came when he began to learn about transcendental meditation, which helped him to quit smoking and drinking. “So I decided to give up my endrocinology practice to focus on holistic health. I think it was just the fact that there is a lot of frustration when all you do is prescribe medication, you start to feel like a legalized drug pusher. That doesn’t mean that all prescriptions are useless, but it is true that 80 percent of all drugs prescribed today are of optional or marginal benefit.”

Chopra argues that for hundreds of years, science mistakenly set in stone distinctions between the biological organism and the environment which don’t really exist. “We are not ‘biological organisms contained in an environment’, that’s a fundamental misperception,” he points out. “The biological organism, whether it’s a sentient human being, or a sentient mosquito, a sentient bacterium, is not separate from the environment. Both the biological organism and what we call the environment are differentiated patterns of behaviour of a single reality, whether you call that reality ‘Gaia’, or ‘Planet Earth’, or even if you wish, the ‘sentient universe’.” Ok, I’m thinking, if that’s the case then what does this shift in perception imply in terms of action? “So you don’t look at that tree and say, ‘oh that tree’s the environment’, that tree’s your lungs, if it didn’t breathe, you wouldn’t breathe”, explained Chopra. “The Earth is your body. The rivers and waters of our planet are your circulation, if you pollute them, you pollute your circulation. The air is your breath. We need to start thinking of the world as our universal body. Because our survival as human beings is equally dependent on our personal bodies, as well as our universal body.”

Now this was a surprisingly refreshing way of thinking that hadn’t occurred to me before – and it seemed to tie in with the diverse calls from psychologists, philosophers and economists for a fundamental shift in our values. What excites me about Chopra is his groundbreaking suggestion that such a shift in values was not simply a case of social convenience, of what works best; but that it might actually reflect the reality of our embeddedness in nature. Intriguingly, although Chopra has faced hostility from the medical establishment in the United States for his views, his consistent work to expand the boundaries of traditional medicine led to the peer-reviewed Journal of American Medicine doing a special issue dedicated to alternative medicine in November 1998. Since then, holistic conceptions of health care have increasingly been researched and recognized. For several years now, Oxford University Press has published a quarterly international peer-reviewed journal, Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM). Dr. Edwin L. Cooper, who is founder and chief-editor of the journal, is also a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Neurobiology at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he heads up UCLA’s Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine. Dr Cooper remarks that the impact of cancer “reaches beyond the physical disease. It shapes a patient’s thoughts and emotions. Increasingly, physicians are recognizing that treating cancer often means more than just aggressively attacking the malignancy. It means considering the whole person—mind, body and soul—and adding complementary approaches that increase health and well-being, reduce stress, boost tolerance of conventional treatments, improve quality of life and help people to live as fully as possible.”

The new UCLA research programme in holistic health is host to the Center for East-West Medicine, housed in UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. The Center, which receives 13,000 patients a year, is working to develop “a model system of comprehensive care with emphasis on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation through the integrated practice of East-West medicine.” These developments in health and medicine back-up Chopra’s arguments by revealing that the fragmentation and separation at the heart of our normal way of making sense of the world are reflections of a fundamental crisis of perception, a mistaken way of understanding human nature and its relationship to Nature. Chopra is pointing to an inherent interconnectedness, not only between mind and body, but also between the organism and its environment.

 The Interconnected Cosmos  

This recognition of interconnectedness in the health sciences is paralleled by new breakthroughs in other sciences, particularly in physics, which suggest that old, mechanistic conceptions of nature and the world are relics of an outdated worldview that no longer fits what’s happening at subatomic levels, beneath the surface of everyday life. At first, I was rather sceptical of the relevance, to questions about social change and global crisis, of a field as seemingly obscure and technical as quantum mechanics. But my bemusement quickly turned to fascination, and then conviction, after discovering one of the pioneers of this revolutionary perspective, Dr. Fritjof Capra, a physicist who teaches and researches theoretical high-energy physics at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. Capra has written widely on the philosophical implications of modern science, and his first book, The Tao of Physics, argued controversially that Western science was now confirming the same fundamental propositions about reality found in Eastern mysticism. When Capra first started work on the manuscript in the 1972, he was spurred on by the realisation that two of his colleagues, both senior physicists who had made paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in the field, agreed with his views. “I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then, and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter.” The “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”, which refers to the impossibility of simultaneously measuring the position and momentum of a subatomic particle, was named after Werner Heisenberg, credited as the founder of the new quantum mechanics.

“He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum mechanisms, had a similar experience when he went to China.”

In a follow-up book, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture, Capra went on to apply his philosophical explorations of the new physics to developments in other areas of science, coming to the conclusion that the crises currently afflicting industrial civilization are rooted in scientific beliefs which are now outmoded on the basis of new data and theories across the physical sciences. He later went on to found the Center for Eco-Literacy in Berkeley, a think-tank addressing the social and ecological implications of new developments across the physical sciences.  

“What quantum physics has brought, indisputably, is a dissolution of the notion of hard and solid objects, and also a dissolution of the notion that there are fundamental building blocks of matter. When you study the smallest pieces of matter that we know, the subatomic particles, you find that you can only talk about probabilities. That's very well known. Since quantum mechanics we know that all these laws and regularities can only be formulated in terms of probabilities. But then you ask, what are these probabilities of? And you find they are probabilities of making a certain measurement, of these large-scale instruments interacting in a certain way. So whatever you say about the smallest pieces comes back to the large pieces -- can be expressed only in probabilities, in terms of the large pieces. It’s sort of a circular situation. In other words, everything is interconnected, interconnected in such a way that the properties of the smallest pieces depend on the properties of the whole.”

In words that sound uncannily similar to those of health-practitioner Deepak Chopra, Capra argued that “whereas before we believed that the dynamics of the whole can be explained in principle by breaking it down, and from the properties of the parts, now we see that the properties of the parts can only be defined in terms of the dynamics of the whole. So it’s a complete reversal. And that’s become one of the most fundamental scientific insights of our century. In fact, if you go even further and ask, ‘Well what are these parts?’ then you will find that there are no parts, that whatever we call a part is a pattern in an ongoing process.”

Capra believes that this insight, or rather the lack or it, lies at the core of global crises, which as we have argued here are all interconnected as manifestations of a defunct global system. For Capra, the interconnection of these crises is further evidence of a dysfunctional perspective of life underlying that system. “These systemic problems, all interlinked, are in fact reflections of the limitations of an outdated world view.” Given that all our social institutions -- the large corporations, the large academic institutions, the large political institutions -- all subscribe to this outdated worldview, it’s therefore not surprising that they are not able to solve the major problems that we have. “The old system shows us such a spectacular failure that the experts in various fields don’t understand their fields of expertise any longer”, Capra argues. “Researchers, for instance investigating cancer, don’t have a clue, in spite of spending millions of dollars, of the origins of cancer. The police are powerless in face of a rising wave of crime. The politicians or economists don’t know how to manage the economic problems. The doctors and hospitals don’t know how to manage the health problems and health costs. So everywhere it’s the very people who are supposed to be the experts in their fields who don’t have answers any longer, and they don’t have answers because they have a narrow view. They don’t see the whole problem.”

But a shift of perspective, of worldview and values, can only be meaningful if it incorporates a shift in our actual modes of social behaviour and organization, in politics, economics and energy. Such a transformation not only needs to be grounded in a more accurate understanding of nature and our relationship to it, but that understanding itself, if authentic, ought to imply certain key changes in our lives. The extent of the change required is, indeed, radical. But for perhaps the first time, the necessity of such change can be justified not merely by moral euphemisms, but by reality itself.

A Quantum Model of Social Harmony  

Another physicist, Danah Zohar who graduated from MIT and Harvard, has followed the implications of Capra’s work on the philosophical implications of quantum physics in the realm of sociology, and even further into real-life problems of business management. Described by the Financial Times as “one of the world’s greatest management thinkers”, Zohar, who currently lectures at the Said Business School at Oxford University, in her book The Quantum Society fashions a concrete eightfold guideline for how social reality ought to be mobilized on the basis of the insights of quantum physics. The new social reality:  

1) Must be holistic -- where it is recognized changes in any part will in some way affect another part.

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