Welcoming Wholeness in Science. With David Lorimer.
David Lorimer is a writer, lecturer and editor who is Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network. AR+ Foundation was just invited to join (thank you!). David was also President of Wrekin Trust and of the Swedenborg Society and is Chief Consultant of Character Education Scotland.
Our conversation focused on the integration of spirituality and science and David’s experiment with related practices that includes successfully inspiring 350,000 young people in the UK to find their life’s purpose. We started with gestures of attunement (of course!).
Hilary: Thank you, David. In finding my way into conversation with you let me first say that I was delighted to receive an invitation to the Galileo Commission that you help lead. We seem to share the view that we do our inquiry within a larger field of intelligence. We operate in a space in which the material and post-materialist worldview might interweave. In reading the Paradigm Explorer I’m looking for points of connection. I am always curious – what might we accomplish together that alone we cannot accomplish? What happens when the work that you’ve been up to meets this space of action research?
David L.: It might be a good start to ask how can people experience the ideas and themes we care about more personally, not merely intellectually. One of my practices is paneurhythmy. This is a Bulgarian sacred dance formulated by Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov www.beinsa-douno.com) in the 1930s. It stands for humanity coming together, with some the themes, such as mutuality, that you’re pointing to.
Hilary. Paneurhythmy. Bulgarian sacred dance. Well, that’s a surprising and delightful place to start our conversation…!
David L. We use gestures, or rather we express gestures in this dance, such as as giving, reconciliation, ascending and liberation.
Hilary. [waving her arms about while guessing at the universal gestures]. I’m a bit stumped at liberation…
David. Yeah that’s good. So liberation is when the chains are released [opening hands downwards], and another gesture represents opening to new ideas and opening to new feelings. [Hilary gives it a try]. And so that’s something that we do in a large group and which is a very moving experience, especially in the Rila Mountains of Bulgaria where it was invented. And I see this as a kind of symphonic parable of people coming together to do something harmonious, and also sending out harmony in the process. So that would be one kind of participating in practice that is part of my life.
Hilary: Well, that’s beautifully said. A symphonic parable of people coming together to do something harmonious, and also sending out harmony in the process. Thank you.
So let’s go back a little bit and dip into your own biography and your journey in coming to appreciate that the world is both material and immaterial. Perhaps it’s even richer when enriched with our imaginary of the invisible. Tell me a bit about your journey?
David L.: I wrote my first book Survival in 1982. I was 30 and teaching at Winchester College, which is one of the oldest schools in the UK. It goes back to 1382. I had a background in philosophy and French literature and I wanted to look at the whole question of the relationship between mind and body. And especially the relation to death and near death experiences, from a spiritual practice point of view.
Hilary. What is your own spiritual practice and confessional origins?
David: I’ve been meditating for over 40 years and I do Beinsa Douno exercises every morning. This is grounding and also enhances my relationship with nature. So for instance, one of the last gestures is where you bring your hands together over your head and then you bring them down in a kind of blessing as if affirming I am in harmony with living nature. The blessings of God flow through me and I feel that when I do it. And then I send the blessing to the four directions.
Hilary: I am reminded of Tai Chi
David L. The rhythm is quite like Tai Chi, but this has a Western origin and there’s a huge amount of teaching behind it as well. But I suppose what appeals to me is it’s not a belief system of dogma but rather five universal principles of love, wisdom, truth, justice and goodness or virtue. These are things that everybody can believe in. Everybody can believe in love and wisdom. Everybody can believe in truth even in these days. And so it doesn’t require you to sign up to a kind of propositional dogma which then separates you off from everybody else with another dogma.
Hilary And your own spiritual or religious, background, inheritance?
David L. I was brought up in the Church of England. I went to school at Eton College where I was confirmed. And at one point, I was even thinking of getting ordained. I was very interested in Swedenborg in my last year at university and I have actually been President of the Swedenborg Society.
Hilary: Known for the resurgence in popularity of angels, right? Did this perhaps lead directly into an appreciation of the invisible, the immaterial realm while maintaining respect for the values of Western material empiricism?
David L.: Swedenborg was someone who was in fact a scientist, engineer and mathematician by background. But his inner senses opened. He was able to report clairvoyant experiences and speak with people who had died. And all this is described in an extraordinary matter of fact way. There’s nothing sensational about it. He just reports a conversation he might’ve had with someone who’s died in the same way as he might report a conversation he had the other day with a friend. And I was very impressed with that. I’d always been looking for a spiritual level of understanding and not a literalistic one. I find literalism extremely constricting. And I find it extraordinary that people can still take the literal view of the Bible as in the fundamentalist persuasion with nearly 200 years nearly of biblical scholarship and everything else we now know.
Hilary: Fundamentalism is a plague upon humanity. And I get you’re not throwing out the baby with the bath water. There is an embrace of the thoughtful religious spiritual tradition. You’re also acknowledging that the Western tradition itself is much richer than many of us seem to realize. I am thinking say of panpsychism that we rarely talk about. Many of us are instead reaching out to the Eastern non-theistic traditions. We may also sense that actually “indigenous knowledge” has always been there under the surface, but eclipsed in the Cartesian Colonization?
David L.: It’s really the living mystical tradition that I’m interested in. And there are many women involved in that. Hildegard von Bingen is a great favorite of Matthew Fox [link] who I am in correspondence with. I will say I am interested in esotericism. There are very interesting interfaces between science and the esoteric. Between science and the mystical in the common search for unity. I’m most interested in the living implications of that sort of view. And the experience of oneness that goes with it.
Hilary: An appreciation of not either or but both and. The non dual as is the popular term for that today. Is that the place where we might find our full spectrum humanity comes to play? Which makes me wonder – I am hearing whispers of the dominant scientific expert mind here. So it’s not really a question as much as a pompous assertion namely “we’re, beyond all that spiritual woowoo stuff. Why, why do you keep going back and digging it up? Can’t you just see it as an archaic phase of human inquiry – especially those annoying women. Hildegards and Hilarys.” Or do you perhaps sense there is yet to be a deeper integration that still needs to happen for us not yet whole humanity?
David L.: There is an integration that needs to happen. I don’t think it’s a phase to be left behind. It’s the process that’s going on at the moment also as scientists open up. My great friend Marilyn Monk says of herself “I’m a biologist. She has done extraordinary research work. And she’ll also say I’m not just a scientist, I’m also a poet and a mystic. But she’ll make quite sharp divisions between those aspects of identity. The poetic and the scientific.
Hilary: I want to bring in the issue of women and their access to integration. We experience in the action research field, generally speaking, that more women show up as action researchers. Many of us have grown tired of sharp distinctions among different facets of our being. Of course expert mind is very concentrated on his expertise and may insist, sure you can have divergent identities. Just don’t bother with integration? It seems that women feel it’s important? Not just women of course. Do you feel it’s important?
David L.: Well, in my experience, we all have different aspects of our identity. We show these different aspects in different situations. One example. I’m a golfer and I’m a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
Hilary. I’ve heard of that. It’s one of the premier golf clubs in the world. A bastion of integrated women in conversation about spiritual matters (laughter).
David. I’ve been a member for 45 years. And so you can imagine that at a dinner at the R & A, you can’t start talking about science and spirituality. Near death experiences are quite inappropriate! But at the same time, sometimes an extra something comes up in conversation. Sometimes a person shows an opening, a glimpse that they might be interested in, an aperçu, as the French would say, of something outside their normal range, outside the conventional. And so at that point, I might just drop something into the conversation.
Another occasion that springs to mind. In the late 1980s I went to Schumacher College to meet with Satish Kumar to see whether I’d like to be involved as core faculty. And then I spent the same evening with a friend in Dartmouth at the Britannia Royal Naval College. These are totally different worlds.
Hilary: From the little I know of Schumacher, I’d guess your interests intersect more there than at the Naval College. At Schumacher there is more awareness of our conditioning, the value but also the control of expertise. They might be able to embrace the intersection of science and spirituality. But the Naval College less so. I suspect they would perhaps disparage those efforts.
David L.: I think that’s true. And that also brings up the question of whose approval are you are looking for?
Hilary: A profound consideration. Yes. Yikes there are so many directions we could go here. But, ok. I have two questions. And they’re linked. 1) when I read your Paradigm Explorer it has seemed a little like conversations at the golf club. In other words waiting for an openness to integration in science, as opposed to inviting or nudging it along. Action researchers are a bit more nudgy you know! 2) Related though and if we really take seriously that we live in a field of intelligence, it’s incorrect to believe that we – as individuals – are the ones in charge of reweaving science and spirituality. We might instead well say, the field of intelligence, of consciousness, is inviting a much more full-spectrum humanity. I bet Hegel would say this better. But do you know what I’m pointing at – how we actually work with wholeness within an already whole field?
David L.: Well, I do. I like your idea of the new emerging, of a full-spectrum humanity. Also of there being a microcosm of some much larger process. So that the individual contribution is like a wave on the surface rather than it being a well-defined contribution from an individual.
I was just thinking that yesterday evening, when I got an email from an old friend I just sent an email to out of the blue. Synchronicity or what he said! I said, it’s the collective mind operating.
Hilary The universal field is operating. Doesn’t seem to take naps. When I remember that I feel happy and relaxed. Within that, I’m doing what needs to be done. Of course then I may also think, what a simply mad idea. As many positivists might like to remind me! So I am grateful that you’re trying to articulate all that for a new wholeness in science. For action researchers I’d say the intellectual articulation is background. And maybe a bit taboo even. We find agreement more in the practice of change and transformation.
David: Carl Jung realized at the end of his life that he done something both useful and useless. His work was important and not important. And I think that we have to embrace this paradox that our lives are a speck and yet they matter. We matter a lot.
Hilary: To become a full-spectrum person is a most marvelous gift. And this may be a little bold of me, but as an Irish person speaking to a fellow Celt who went to Eton, I can’t help myself. From my vantage you do your work of articulating science and spirituality in the body of an aristocrat, or at least with aristocratic trappings. So there’s something very powerful in that. It’s certainly different from when an indigenous person does this reweaving. But in a way, it’s deeply ironic. Humanity always had its full-spectrum-ness. It’s just it was stripped away by Colonialism, right. I’m pointing here to more political understandings of why we are in this mess to begin with. Our sense of ourselves and of humanity has become so fragmented. Our understanding is also colonized by the Cartesian emphasis on the rational mind.
David L.: I like that. Cartesian colonialism. It’s colonized the mind.
Hilary: It colonizes the mind and it’s colonized bodies, especially of ones who are not, um, gentlemen. I feel this links us to this issue of why so many women show up in the integrating spaces, such as the Action Research space. Perhaps also in your work. Are you are seeing this too?
David. Yes. I think women come at things from more of an angle of wholeness. It’s a classic insight, you know, to note that men have a slightly undeveloped feeling side and they don’t listen with intuition. That happens in close relationships too. We can say men will have to develop a different sort of sensitivity. And one way past this is to know when to say nothing. Sometimes that’s really the best thing to say – nothing.
Hilary. OK, I know I should practice that too – saying nothing. Is this a practice of integrating feminine and masculine interview skills [laughter].
David L.: There’s also an embodiment that women bring. Less abstraction tolerated. One of my great friends is Anne Baring who is the author of The Dream of the Cosmos. She’s been doing some amazing webinars for Ubiquity University. If you look at Anne’s website you see it has art by her husband Robin. And they’re both 89. Anne is working creatively every day and has just created a series of five illustrated webinars as well as speaking out on the horrors of nuclear weapons.
Hilary: She exemplifies full-spectrum humanity. Let’s pivot as close. What do you hope for in the future? What do you hold in intention? And I specifically wonder how much relationship and mutuality matters – as I see emphasis on the relational field is so key in AR+.
David L.: Well, we also have to create mutuality within ourselves with these different aspects that we’ve been talking about. Very basically between the yin and the yang. The active and the receptive. How to navigate in life. And when one is appropriate and when another, and when there’s a mixture of the two required.
I have a book coming out later this year. It’s called A Quest for Wisdom and has 25 of my essays. When I’m reading anything spiritual now I say it doesn’t make the cut if it isn’t about love and wisdom. Without love and wisdom it hasn’t really hit the target. That to me is my compass direction, to move towards a culture of love and wisdom.
Hilary: At AR+ we really love creative experiments that grow out of love and wisdom. Let’s set our GPS on that. And what does that actually look like for you?
David. I also do that through education. I should mention that I have had an educational project running for about 15 years called Inspiring Purpose. This is for young people 10 to 15. We try and help them define themselves and their aspirations. The theme this year is sustainable futures. We’re encouraging young people to see themselves as global citizens. We say they are global citizens in the making.
Hilary: Beautiful. You’re touching the next generation. They tend to be more relational, more experiential and experimental. This is good news for action research. At AR+ we say work for transformation includes turning the camera on ourselves and becoming aware of our purpose. And then bringing more mutuality in creating, or really to co-creating the kinds of worlds we want.
What you’re cultivating is terrifically important. Intention, purpose. I’d say it connects to having the kids value their own experience. So I must ask. What kind of good outcomes are you seeing?
David L.: Yes, the model is edu-care, the Latin meaning of education, which means to draw out from inside. We provide a framework of reflection for young people, which starts with noting our own qualities. They thinking about what they’re good at, and what they might need to work on. And then it goes into inspiration. Who are you inspired by and why? And it has to be a non family member. And then what’s your vision for a sustainable world? Or what’s your vision for a peaceful world? And what are you actually going to do to make it happen, to contribute towards it. And so the results we get are published in our magazines. I edit a magazine from young people’s contributions and it’s an incredibly inspiring.
Hilary: What’s your favorite results so far? What are you most proud of?
David L.: Well, the fact that this has been done by hundreds of thousands of young people and so just one story, which is illustrative. I got a bit of feedback from a boy who said that when this started, he thought it was just another boring personal and social education lesson. But as he got into it, he realized it was a secret lesson teaching him about life. He said he just loved it. So the most rewarding thing for me is that kind of feedback. 350,000 students have been through the program.
Hilary: Yikes, that’s a serious program. Wonderful!
David L.: The program is 15 years old. This year we have 18,000 involved.
Hilary: Are you working with school systems? How are you supporting the action part?
David L.: We work with schools with young people just at the point where they’re finding and defining themselves. When they want both to stand out and to fit in. And then we we have a link with a volunteering program. And in fact this was partly initiated by the Prince of Wales whom I know quite well. And so that commits people to volunteering activity. Obviously we’d don’t have the capacity to follow up and see whether they’ve what they set out to do. Besides, we have to do it together. And so in that sense we spark a fundamental motivation towards self-knowledge, self-awareness and empowerment.
Hilary: I’m left with, for what it’s worth, that I would so love to see an accounting of the cumulative impact.
David L.: Well, we were the subject of a three-year research from Montclair University in character development. That was the focus because we have been mainly funded by the John Templeton Foundation with their emphasis on character and virtue development. Montclair did find some positive results as compared with a control group who hadn’t done the program.
Hilary: I personally would be interested in what are they actually accomplished for others, alongside themselves. You’re inviting them to find their own voice. So cool. I also wonder how the students’ experiments both changed themselves as the creators of the experiments, but also gave rise to ripple effects. Maybe that’s a project for AR+ one day. You know when we have tons of resources!
David L.: Yeah. It’s just a small intervention. You might describe it as a sort of nudge. The teachers who do it over a number of years swear by it. The endorsements from teachers have been very, very strong. Because they find out now what makes the student tick. And they wouldn’t necessarily find that out from a geography essay. We don’t mention the word spirituality. But it’s underpinned by that all right. The core is a spiritual impulse of helping people find out who they are at a deeper level.
Hilary. Spirituality is such a loaded term. So much bad has been done in the name of spirituality or religion. This makes for a tragic roadblock to conversation about things that matter deeply.
David L.: You have to be quite careful. I remember in the late seventies, I taught meditation to some students in Edinburgh. The headmaster called me aside and he was a bit worried. Students have been telling their parents There were worries that it wasn’t Christian. And I said to him, all I’m doing is getting them to watch their breath!
Hilary: You watch your breath then you watch your mind. You might awaken to all the hypocrisy around. Dangerous for the grown ups!
I can share that I like to start almost all AR+ meetings with a brief meditation to settle into shared intention. Three years ago that was still a bit weird. But slowly but surely it’s no longer weird. Or I am so weird I don’t notice. But I know I am hearing more that, “oh yeah, I downloaded this meditation app.” Makes for much more productive meetings too.
I better bring us to a close. This interview is a bit different from what we normally share at AR+. This is the first time that we’ve explicitly addressed issues of spirituality.
David L.: The times are more facilitating, more welcoming of this perspective. I also think that this stress that people are under through modern life and technology means that they do at a certain level realize that they need to switch off and have some silence.
Hilary: Why not. Meditation is free; reflexivity might even be more fun than Netflix! David It’s been so good to connect. I look forward to our paths crossing again. Thank you and good luck with your work.
