A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle

When I was a sophomore at Pitzer College, before I transferred to Evergreen, I was in a course called, "Analysis of Human Motor Skills," in which we looked through a neuroscientific and biochemical lens and used some very elementary principles of physics to deconstruct and understand human movement. At the end of the semester, we were assigned a group research and experimental project. In our research on the effect of intention on physical ability, we came across a researcher in California doing quantitative experiments in measuring Qi. The methods of his research indicated that this group was measuring Qi through correlates of blood flow, nerve conduction and very specific and sensitive measurements of temperature. Qi was being redefined in terms of the measurable, physical reality in which Western science excels.

Last week, I received a monthly email newsletter from Kripalu (the "mothership" for yoga and traditional healing therapies on the East coast of the US). In this edition of the newsletter, Kripalu was promoting a new program on "Evidence-Based TaiChi." Intrigued, I read the detailed description of the program which states, "in scientific trials, Dr. Yang and his colleagues have shown that the program improves strength, balance, immune function, and cognition." While the Kripalu website has no link or further information on Dr. Yang's studies or published papers, with some effort, I uncovered his research: five controlled, longitudinal studies, two of which were fully randomized control trials. The Randomized Controlled Trial (RTC) is the pinnacle of modern scientific experimental design- the gold standard.

In my last post, I wrote about Western scientists "and their little atoms." I received two different responses: one was a prompt to investigate why so many people and organizations are so keen to "put East and West into conversation," or why there is this trend to use one's standard to measure the other; the other response was a defense from the Western scientific perspective. Let me first address the language I used in the last post, quoted above. My intention was not to disrespect science or scientists, though I realize now that my word choice was a bit uncivil, and for that I apologize. My intention was instead to call into question the dogmatic belief in the primacy of matter, in the denial of other paradigms of thinking and knowing in favor of the singular Absolute, the analytical-- at the expense of holistic systems thinking, and the ability to hold two or more ideas at once, recognizing the validity of both. To quote my father, "It is the experimental method that defines western science, not atoms or Newton. Science is neither the worship of given wisdom nor even a body of knowledge. Science is a virtue. At least when it is at its best. It is a humble and self critical exploration on the edge of uncertainty. Science is common sense with publication of interesting results."

Science as a virtue, that is as an abstract quality of thinking, is something I admire very much. It amazes me daily how much we have come to know and understand about our world, the brain and the human body, but what frightens me- what leaves me skeptical and perhaps a bit cynical, is what I see in the application of this virtue. As I said, I aim to challenge the dogma that has grown around the current (and not so current) knowledge in science. A detailed discussion on this is beyond the scope of what I will write here, but let me give an example of what I am referring to. Half a century ago, the prevailing view of the brain was of neural circuits that were, for all intents and purposes, "hard-wired" and inalterable. This left thousands suffering with various forms of dementia and Alzheimer's with no hope, and implied that adults simply couldn't learn anything of significance. Ultimately, this neuroscience paradigm held that people cannot change their minds, and since the prevailing belief is that every behavior has a neural correlate, people cannot change, period. In the last fifty years, a huge mass of research has proven this perspective incomplete; it is now a widely accepted notion in the field of neuroscience and psychology that the brain is, in fact, highly plastic, flexible and continually renewing. This is where the BUT comes in. BUT, as neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran states in his book, The Tell-Tale Brain, "generations of medical students were told that the brain's trillions of neural connections are laid down in the fetus and during early infancy and that adult brains lose their ability to make new neural connections." Many neuroscience and medical textbooks still make this claim, despite heaps of evidence to the contrary. Other scientists like Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief), Dr. Candace Pert (The Molecules of Emotion), Lynn McTaggart (The Field) and others who have challenged prevailing and persistent theories with new (and decades-old) research leading to radically different understandings of our world have been tacitly ignored or outright denied by the scientific and medical community at large while their research has been, for the most part withheld from public knowledge or general education.

Additionally, I see a denial of humanity in science that is not only offensive, but dangerous. On the one hand, the attempt to "control" for certain biases or influences is admirable in the light of seeking Truth. However, we must also recognize that scientists (as human beings) have biases; humans are story-tellers- it is how we create our identities and our perception of the world, but the Truth-seeking scientific method has no room for the multiple stories that are True for different individuals. The notion of one ultimate Truth (perhaps related to the West's preference for monotheism?), denies the possibility of coinciding, opposing/complementary and equally valid stories/truths/hypotheses. we have such a hard time accepting, understanding, and applying the knowledge that atoms behave both as particles and as waves because we have this illusion that there is One Absolute Truth (or God?). Perhaps this is the same reason that Dr. Huang claims the impossibility of integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western medicine.

It is typically encouraged before designing and conducting scientific experiments to make a list of assumptions or biases. The list is meant to make a scientists aware of his or her blind spots, but the problem comes when the scientist or peer reviewers have the same blind spots and thus, as the term implies, cannot SEE them, cannot become aware of them. In designing experiments to prove or disprove or measure Qi, there are enormous blind spots in the Western scientist's field of vision and so these experiments end up collapsing things they cannot see into things they can: Qi turns into blood-flow and heat, TaiChi turns into physical movement, and the Ayurvedic doshas are collapsed into elements of constitution or causes of disease.

Truth-seeking is a natural human drive, and an important and a good one at that, but we  have narrowed our vision (perhaps Dr. Huang has as well), and it is understandable that we attempt to make sense of things using the tools most readily available to us: current and comfortable definitions that map our reality. 

**This next bit may seem like an irrelevant tangent, but bear with  me**

There is a story of a rich man asking Jesus what he needed to do in order to secure his place in the kingdom of God. When Jesus told him to give up his worldly possessions and aid the poor, the man was frustrated and a bit ambivalent about following these instructions. Jesus then turned towards his disciples and proclaimed, "it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God.”

Michael Mervosh writes, "Stories have been told as far back as the 15th century about a gate used to enter into the walled city of ancient Jerusalem, after the main gate was closed for the day.  This gate was very narrow. Thus, a fully loaded camel had to have its baggage removed so it could pass through the gate and proceed to its desired destination." (source, http://www.herosjourneyfoundation.org/blog/) Thus, the image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle can be interpreted as the seemingly impossible journey to a desired destination, or perhaps more abstractly, to Truth. Just as the camel at the gate to Jerusalem, we must shed our "baggage," our preconceived notions, or ego in order to pass through the eye of the needle and attain a more holistic understanding, a more complete Truth. 

When we approach Truth with genuine science, we find immense value, as Jacob Brownowski put it, "By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science." 

However, we must also realize that for as objective as we may attempt to be, subjectivity is inescapable to the human mind, whether scientist or psychoanalyst. From the book, "Biology Under The Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture and Health" by Richard Lewontins and Richard Levins:

"One the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry. The result is a peculiarly uneven development, with increasing sophistication at the level of the laboratory and research project, along with a growing irrationality of the scientific enterprise as a whole. This gives us a pattern of insight and blindness, of knowledge and ignorance, that is not dictated by nature, leaving us helpless in the big problems facing our species. This dual nature gives us a science impelled both by its internal development and the very mixed outcomes of its applications to understand complexity as the central intellectual problem of out time. But it is held back by the philosophical traditions of reductionism, the institutional fragmentation of research, and the political economy of knowledge as commodity."

Science, like Truth, is a virtue to strive for. Scientists are human, doctors make mistakes, and brains rewire. We must not hold too tightly to the maps science has drawn for us for they are not the territory. In order for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle, it must be stripped of all it wishes to carry in with it. What would happen if we were to approach every scientific inquiry with what is termed in Zen Buddhism as "the beginners mind?" Perhaps we would find that "pure science" described by Brownowski.