REDEFINING SCIENCE
by Brian O'Leary

On a practical level, I see the most single important issue of our time as the need to reallocate the massive resource the superpowers are investing in weapons toward economically and environmentally beneficial projects that would bring the United States, Europe, and the U.S.S.R. into a far higher quality of life. Through economic conversion policies set by world leaders, we can balance the trade and federal deficits, clean up the environment, develop safe energy paths, and boldly strike into the twenty first century as co-explorers of inner and outer space. A centerpiece of this reordering of priorities could be a cost-effective international manned mission to Mars led by the United States and Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachev is ready to do this with investments coming from Japan and elsewhere. Through conversion, negotiation, and verification, we can quickly wind down the Cold War, cease developing space weapons, cut way back on our nuclear arsenals, and begin a worldwide renaissance.

Research and development (R & D) in science and technology determines to a great degree our future long-range course in our standard of living; today's blueprints are tomorrow's multi-billion dollar projects. They form the thin edge of a wedge into the future a generation or two from now.

Governmental R & D projects, when they reach the billion dollar spending level, gather momentum of interest (jobs, votes, profits) that leads to deployment even if the system is found to be unworkable or inappropriate. In the United States alone, during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, federal R & D shifted heavily toward weapons systems with SDI, the largest single R & D program ever (over $20 billion spent so far). We must find a way to replace bureaucratic and private self-interest as the driving force for technological growth. A relatively small power elite unconsciously determine the priorities we live with for decades to come. A public critical mass of individuals aware of this will eventually balance the situation -- hopefully by the year 2000.

Einstein once said, "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it." We need a new consciousness to solve the problems of the Earth, a new science that incorporates the principles of mind over matter, unity, and peace. It is my conviction that such a science and technology is close at hand.

At times I have prided myself on being a futurist, one who could extrapolate the trends of our technologies to supercomputers, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, asteroid mining, space colonies, star ships, artificial intelligence, and radio contact with possible extraterrestrial civilizations. But now I see that this view is far too limited. My radical personal experiences over the past decade, and rapidly accelerating scientific evidence inevitably point us in a totally different direction. That direction, as well as "anomalous" results in scientific observation, leads us back to the importance of our inner experience.

We have seen that most major developments of physics in this century have involved elementary particles that are not really particles, but are evidently packets of energy that interact with the observer and with one another in ways that we yet do not clearly understand. We have seen that UFO and crop-circle phenomena are so pervasive and complex that we can no longer ignore the data. We have observed features on Mars that defy mundane description. We have analyzed physical measurements from the megalithic sites in England that show us Earth energies do exist and are related to celestial cycles. We have seen that our thoughts and emotions can be communicated to plants and to our own donated, at-a-distance white blood cells, and that distance (and perhaps time as well) do not matter. We have found we can heal ourselves using mind over matter techniques. We have seen that near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, and reincarnation data all point to the possibility that we may survive physical death -- that immortality may be the true condition of our consciousness, a truth we must have had once, before civilization, and lost.

As a species, we are once again becoming universal newborns, but our denial of the widening cracks in our cosmic eggs could be our downfall, our suffocation. History shows time and again that, as we make the transition to a new world view, the old order holds on out of fear and habit until it can hold on no longer. As Thomas Kuhn put it in his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, "The reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. Some old problems may be relegated to another science or declared entirely 'unscientific'. Others that were previously non-existent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement."

I believe we need an entirely new science to solve our global problems. Given the evidence in nature for a transcending order in the universe, it now seems as though we might be able to do what previously seemed to be impossible: to transform ourselves and our planet through individual and collective thought and intention. If a lunar astronaut could blot out the entire Earth with his thumb, is it not possible to blot out terrestrial ecocide by swift strokes of healing consciousness?

Yet how are we to heal our planet in the presence of such extensive public denial and private greed? It seems that, by analogy to the terminal human patient, the old medicine of band aids, drugs, and surgery are not adequate to turn the tide. As Peter Russell suggests in The Global Brain, we need to risk looking at Gaia as a superorganism and at the already proven healing powers of the new medicine. As a collective consciousness, what can we do to heal the planet that has given us our existence and our health? I believe we can, as suggested in experiments conducted by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Marcel Vogel, Spindrift, Inc., and others. A critical mass of aligned individuals may be what is required to make the necessary changes.

But more of us need to begin to look inward. We can use the group mind to envision a peaceful, harmonious planet. We can let go of our fears that the prognosis is grim, that the outcome will be disastrous, and instead act as joyful transformational scientists opening ourselves to the energy of healing. We can create for ourselves a global psychokinesis, a mind-over-matter series of physical changes to heal the cancer we have inflicted on the entire world. But first we must stop being only angry or fearful about our sorry state of affairs, and begin to forgive ourselves and others, and to bathe ourselves with the inner light I wrote of earlier. By using the power of our inner space, we can radiate our loving worldwide and thereby transform the planet.

We can go beyond our reductionist science and accept our new holistic science. We can learn how to understand our home planet just as our megalithic forebears were evidently able to do. We can learn to diagnose its illnesses end to take action with love and good humor. And we can heal ourselves and our separate political structures as we heal the planet.

Brian O'Leary was a NASA scientist-astronaut during the Apollo program and a deputy team leader for the Mariner 10 Venus-Mercury probe. He has taught at Cornell, California Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, and Princeton. His books include Mars 1999 and Exploring Inner and Outer Space. He also lectures worldwide on the future of space exploration.

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.