UNCONSCIOUS BELIEVING, CHOOSING, AND KNOWING

Why aren't there Beethovens, Gandhis, or Einsteins in everybody's family?  If everyone possesses an inate capacity for breakthrough to higher kinds of creativity - what is it, exactly, that hides the key and holds most of us back from discovering how to use these talents?
Among the deep unconscious beliefs everybody holds are beliefs about human potentialities and limitations - one's own, and other people's.  These limits tend to be confirmed by experience, not because they are true but because they are believed.  In the familiar phenomena used in demonstrations of hypnosis, a hypnotized person told to perceive a "solid wall" where there is none can "perceive" the experience as so real that capillaries burst and the hand becomes physically bruised from "striking" the wall.
On the other hand, a different kind of suggestion may lead to the body being able to perform feats it could not otherwise do - form a rigid bridge between two chairs or lift a heavy object.
The currently acceptable models of human capacities, and people's beliefs about the limits of those capacities, as viewed by our society and "approved" by science, tend to be based on a number of implicit premises that have gone unchallenged until recently.  Following are examples:

1. "Mind is a function of the physical components of the brain, and only a function of the brain.  Scientific understanding of human behavior ultimately can be framed in terms of physical processes in the brain."

2. "The only way people can acquire knowledge is, in the last analysis, through the physical senses."

3. "All qualitative properties are ultimately reducible to quantitative ones; in other words, color can be reduced to a relationship between wavelengths and events in the brain, hate and love and consciousness will one day be reduced to a chemical reaction of glandular secretions, etc.  What we know as consciousness, or awareness of our thoughts and feelings, is really only a side effect of these physical and biochemical processes occurring in the brain."

4. "There is a clear distinction between the objective world, which is perceivable by anyone, and subjective experience, which is perceived by the individual alone in the privacy of his or her own mind.

5. "The concept of the 'free person' is a prescientific explanation for behavior.  Behavior is determined by forces impinging upon individuals from the environment, in interaction with internal tensions characteristic of the human biological organism.  From the standpoint of behavioral science, psychic freedom and free choice are mere illusions.  'Freedom' is behavior for which scientists have not yet found the cause."

6. "The average person possesses little or no genius or talent, and their capacity for inspiration is limited intellectually to the extent of whatever IQ they were fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be born with."

7. "Belief in extraordinary psychic talents, such as ESP, out-of­body experiences, etc. are superstitious holdovers from a less sophisticated era, and do not exist at all except as hallucinations, delusion, or wishful thinking."

Each of these statements seems reasonable enough and compatible with science at its best - yet the evidence that we are examining in this book will challenge all seven of these statements.  Many of you may not even look upon these statements as "beliefs," but consider them to be "facts" - in the same way that several decades aago you might have argued that it was a "fact" and not a "belief" that something could not be both a wave and a particle at the same time.
History has shown, time and again, that popular opinion about human limits can change, and that human limits themselves can change drastically.  In Europe, for thousands of years, there was no "fact" considered more well established than the innate inability of peasants to learn how to read.  In the fifteenth century, the printing press was invented, and the literate population jumped from a miniscule elite to a significant portion of the general population.  In the time of Samuel Johnson the simple ability to perform sums in arithmetic was considered to be something of an esoteric art. johnson's biographer, Boswell, noted how hard it was for Johnson, surely one of the most educated men of his era, to teach himself this arcane art.

Our lives and our behaviors are much more profoundly affected by the beliefs we hold unconsciously than by the beliefs we hold consciously.  It is apparent that to reach the breakthrough state we must make a fundamental shift in consciously and unconsciously held beliefs we all hold about our own limitations.  Moreover, it appears that there are ways in which unconscious beliefs can be deliberately reprogrammed.  And knowing about the possibility of reshaping one's beliefs is the necessary prelude to doing so.
The influence of beliefs begins with perception, the main tool we have to judge external reality.  Of all the stimuli that impinge on the sensory receptors of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, only a small portion ever reach our conscious experience awareness.  Some "inner observer" or mechanism unconsciously selects which inputs should reach awareness and shunts the rest to some other part of the mind.  This selection is influenced by people's expectations, particularly as they are conditioned by beliefs arising from previous experience or learning, and by what people want or believe they need to perceive - or need not to perceive.
The effect of beliefs and attitudes on visual perception even appears to extend to the pupil of the eye, which tends to dilate (and thus increase perception of light) when we are presented with something we want to see, and contract (thus decreasing visual input) when there is something before us we want not to see.  Similar effects seem to hold for the other
senses as well.
Our processes of interpretation - the ways we organize sensory experience and the methods we learn by which we assign meaning to what we perceive - we also influenced by beliefs.  FFor example, in an otherwise darkened room, when an oversized playing card is displayed considerably further away than an undersized football, both are seen as normal-sized, with the playing card appearing closer and the football further away.  In another well-known experiment, rapidly exposed playing cards with reversed color-suit combinations (black hearts, red spades) were often perceived as the subject would normally expect to see them (red hearts, black spades).'
One of the most often cited examples of seeing what we expect to see is the finding that poor children see coins as larger than do the children of wealthy parents.  Hungry subjects see more food objects in vague pictures (so vague, in fact, that they are actually no more than smudges) than do well-fed subjects, etc.
One of the most powerful formers of beliefs is the surrounding culture.  People who grow up in different cultures literally perceive the world in different ways.  The 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits found that the natives were not fooled by optical illusions that uniformly deceived Europeans. Malinowski observed that the Trobriand Islanders, who believed that all characteristics are inherited from the father, regularly failed to see resemblances of the child to the mother's side of the family.
Extensive clinical and experimental research and anthropological observations have provided further support for the hypothesis that to some degree we only see what our culture tells us we can see, only know what our society tells us we can know.
The findings from studies of hypnosis are particularly startling.  Through hypnotic suggestion we may see what no one else sees, or fail to see what everyone else can see clearly; we may experience limitations where there are none, or display extraordinary strength or mental facility.  The implication is especially jarring when we recognize- the similarity between the "state of suggestibility" characteristic of hypnosis and the power of the suggestions given by one's culture.  We do not know the extent to which we are all hypnotized to perceive the particular version of reality that is communicated by our culture.
This cultural consensus changes over time, in both conscious and unconscious aspects, in a variety of ways.  Some beliefs, close to the "surface," but nevertheless connected to our deeper feelings about ourselves, can be modified through the historical processes of science and education.  In 1492, the educated majority "knew" that the Earth is both flat and the center of the universe.  When sailors looked at the horizon back then, they saw a place where they might very well fall off the Earth.  A few people like Columbus suspected that this knowledge was not factual, but a matter of incorrect belief.
Even more deeply held and less consciously sensed beliefs about one's most basic identity as a human being, and sense of one's relationship to the rest of the universe, may be formed early in life and remain essentially unchanged throughout life; if they are altered, it is likely to be in the context of a life trauma of major proportions.  "Enlightenment," 4 i satori...... samadhi," "being born again" are among the many names people have given to those singular experiences powerful enough to reconfigure the deepest unconscious beliefs.
In fact, we not only believe unconsciously but we also choose unconsciously.  One way we choose unconsciously is to protect ourselves by blocking from our awareness information or experience that contradicts our unconscious belief system (in what psychotherapists call "denial" - not seeing what's there) or that implies any need for change in those beliefs (what psychotherapists term "resistance").  According to this hypothesis, if we encounter knowledge that would change our personality (an essential belief system), the internal censor, operating deep in the unconscious, treats such knowledge as a threat and attempts to ignore it.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out that we are all ambivalent when it comes to knowing about ourselves; we want to know (consciously) and yet we also go to great lengths (unconsciously) to prevent ourselves from knowing.  He identified this taboo against some kinds of inner knowledge as "the need to know and the fear of knowing." As Maslow has said, we fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves (what Jung aptly named "the shadow"), but we fear even more to know "the godlike in ourselves."
We are ambivalent about our desire to know ourselves.  We will resist that knowledge which we most deeply desire.  We think we want to see reality as it is, to see it truthfully.  But the illusions we harbor are part of an unconsciously held belief system.  Any attack on those illusions is perceived (unconsciously) as a threat.  Thus, an effort to dispel illusion, although ultimately beneficial, may nevertheless generate resistance.  We may truly desire to discover and actualize our highest capabilities.  Yet to the extent that removing illusion is essential to that discovery, we will resist that which we truly desire.  We may, in fact, resist it by using the most convincing "scientific" arguments and concepts.
Part of the reason for this is that in our culture we have been systematically taught not to trust our own minds.  The Darwinian theory of evolution was a product of the Victorian age, and even though our understanding of evolutionary process has become much more sophisticated since then, the idea still persists in our culture that there is only a "thin veneer of civilization" between our conscious, socialized, ego-minds and the seething subconscious memories of "nature red in tooth and claw" that lurk, barely controlled, as animal urges
just beneath the surface.
Freud's concept of unconscious sexual and aggressive forces at odds with the rules of civilized life added sinister and emotionally laden connotations to the Victorian interpretation of evolution, as did tales of people who "went off the deep end" because of their foolhardy insistence on exploring the depths of their own minds.  Better not to look in there, or if you must, be sure to have a psychiatrist present to watch after you, because what you find might drive you crazy.  Of course, if one deeply believes that the unconscious realms are to be generally feared and distrusted, unpleasant experiences undoubtedly await one.
     But surely there is something very strange if not almost insane about the idea that one can't trust one's own mind.  We go to sleep every night, and part of us remembers how to breathe.  Every time we take a step, we throw our leg into space and fall forward, trusting that our foot will land in just the right way to prevent us from pitching onto our face.  Learning how to walk in the first place was one part learning how to master the movements and nine parts learning how to trust the self to do it.
When you think about it, many of the things we do in a normal day involve an enormous amount of trust in the capabilities of our minds.  We put ourselves in control of a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds and navigate it through rush-hour traffic, all the while trusting our ability to perceive accurately and make split-second, life-or-death decisions.
This cultural predisposition toward mistrust of our unconscious minds (while relying on them at the same time) means that any serious attempt at self-revelation will arouse strong and subtle resistance.  Even reading the relatively innocuous paragraphs above may arouse objections that one can recognize as resistance by the intensity of associated feeling: "People do 'go off the deep end'!" "Society would fall apart if we didn't rationally control our unconscious minds!" And so on.
 

THE TABOO AGAINST INNER KNOWING

Science is a method for gathering and validating knowledge, a method that has extraordinary credibility because of the technological marvels it has wrought.  But science, in the sense it is used when we judge something to be "not scientific," is also an ideology - an institutionalized belief system - and like any other belief system, science tends to have its dogmas and its taboos.  One of these taboos is very closely related to the kind of resistance toward knowing about ourselves that we exhibit as individuals.
The particular kind of cultural trance induced on inhabitants of the Western world in the twentieth century involves the disguised enshrinement within the institution of science of a long-standing and powerful taboo against inner knowledge of an unauthorized kind.  Modern science developed in an industrializing society that put high value on those kinds of knowledge that would contribute to the generation of mechanical technologies.  This emphasis led to a tendency to test all knowledge by its usefulness in predicting and controlling the natural world.
The question of whether this emphasis might have contributed to a hidden bias - that the scientific beliefs in reductionism (the idea that the best and only way to understand something is to reduce it to its parts) and positivism (the belief that only publicly measurable phenomena can be studied) have prevented serious study of some aspects of human consciousness that might be vital to everyone - ought not to be unaskable.  Yet such questions, potentially valuable as they might be, have not been seriously pursued.  In many instances, those who have attempted to do so were actively discouraged by the scientific orthodoxy.
Since we can easily observe that other cultures, past and present, have their hidden biases and blind spots - from societies that tolerate slavery or cannibalism, to those that worship cats or live in fear of eclipses - it is reasonable to assume that our cuulture probably has its own biases.  But to anyone with years of scientific training, all through which the conviction was thoroughly drummed in that conventional science is our surest guide to truth, it can come as a shock to realize that science itself (or unreasoning belief in its unlimited power) might be seriously biased.
We have all chuckled over the story of the drunk who lost his house key in a dark alley and was caught looking for it under the comer streetlight "because the light is better here." Scientific research has been looking largely "where the light is better'! - where the knowledge can be measured and quantified, where hypotheses can be tested with neatly controlled, repeatable experiments, where deterministic models and reductionistic explanations seem to fit comfortably.  As it happens, many useful things have been learned under the light of science - but that doesn't mean that the world outside that circle of light may not offer much of value, once it is illuminated by an expanded concept of scientific inquiry.
The validity of science as a way of predicting and controlling many aspects of the universe is not to be denied.  However, as we shall see later on, some of the most eminent scientists have begun to question whether other kinds of knowledge less amenable to the prediction-and-control criterion might be critically important at this time in history.
One of the more puzzling aspects of the history of science has been its relative neglect of the topic of human consciousness - especially the role of extraordinary states of consciousness in which creative breakthroughs often occur.  It is surely not because the topic was unimportant; the study is quite evidently of central importance to any understanding of human consciousness, motivation, and well-being.  But it has been an awkward subject to deal with.
Because of this extraordinary power to foster consensus, this "new method of thought," as some European reformers referred to it when it was first constructed, seemed to transcend all other ideologies.  The positivistic bias became an unspoken code of conduct for researchers, indicating through the shared attitudes of a community what is "scientific" and what is "not scientific." In this sense, "scientific" became a euphemism for "proper."
Despite the universal consensus about scientific knowledge of the external world, no such agreement has been reached about how to go about publicly validating knowledge of private experience, in particular, the experience of the deep intuition.  Indeed, there is no obvious agreement about the content of such knowledge, or its use to individuals or societies, if the knowledge happens to be outside the image of human nature and capacities that is maintained within industrial cultures.  Strangely, this lack of agreement among scientists differs sharply from the apparent recent convergence of views held by various spiritual traditions around the world, regarding the same subject.
The historical circumstance was such that positivism gained its power before psychology and anthropology were developed, and before the influence of unconscious beliefs was scientifically validated.  The implications that recent anthropological and psychological findings about beliefs and belief systems contain, regarding the very nature of the scientific enterprise, were not immediately and enthusiastically recognized, even in a community committed to objectivity and the discovery of truth, for much the same reasons that individuals resist self-knowledge that threatens their delusions.
The problem in dealing with such matters of the mind and the soul in such a system is the difficulty in looking objectively at any minds or souls other than one's own.  These difficulties include the problem of how to treat self - reports of subjective experience; the problem of the relative non-replicability of consciousness-related phenomena; the problem of observer influence; the problem of data reliability with sentient subjects who are capable of conscious and unconscious choice deception; the problem of individual uniqueness; the question of the place of purpose and meaning; and the question of the appropriate basis for public validation of that knowledge.  The first scientists quite justifiably started by looking at those aspects of nature that all observers could easily agree upon.
Even before the solidification of the scientific method in the eighteenth century and its marriage to industrial technology in the nineteenth century, a worldwide consensus developed on how the positivistic kind of knowledge should be openly sought and validated.  Thus, in the physical and biological sciences a coherent body of scientific knowledge developed, with near global agreement about its contents.  Because of this agreement, we need not speak of an American biology or a German mathematics, a socialist physics or a capitalist astronomy.
When science was young, important psychological and cultural factors were combined in keeping the mysteries of human consciousness outside its boundaries.  Part of it was rooted in a desire to keep the scientific mode of inquiry clearly distinct from the religious dogmatism of the past.  During its emergence in 17th century Europe, science encountered fierce religious opposition, and the authority of the church was preeminent.  As a result, an almost territorial consensus developed, whereby science would concern itself with the body and the physical world, and the church would concern itself with the soul and the psyche.
But at the heart of the scientific hesitation to encompass subjective" or "metaphysical" knowledge can be found not a methodological difficulty or a scientific theory or a body of experimental findings, but a philosophical attitude known as positivism, first articulated over a century ago.  This assumption places valid knowledge about reality exclusively in the realm of direct, externally oriented, ("positive") sensory experience.  This unspoken, by now partly unconscious belief at the center of the scientific system holds that only this kind of experience is verifiable, and hence is the only proper base for valid ("scientific") knowledge.
The scientific method is of course not in any sense "wrong." Its present form is simply not very suitable for probing some of the secrets of the human mind, despite our wide­spread belief that the relentless progress of science is marching toward solving all the mysteries of human nature.  The problem for those who have tried to study some of these mysteries has been the unspoken, but widely implicit denial of the usefulness of looking outside the illuminated circle of measurable, repeatable, predictable, controllable data.
Since our readers, like ourselves, were raised within a society that deeply cherishes the scientific tradition, many of you will undoubtedly experience difficulty in accepting the suggestion that science as it exists today might be perpetuating a limiting and damaging cultural bias.  We are not insisting that the bias be seen.  Rather, we are raising the question: "How do we know the bias is not present?" As the famous neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch was known to say: "Don't bite my finger.  Look where I'm pointing."
Since the scientific method depends on logic, on the mathematical accumulation of facts, and because this is how we have been taught to judge the reality of an assertion, you would expect that the origin of the scientific method itself would be the result of just such a rigorous compilation of cool, dry, reason.
But strangely, there is a good case to be made for the proposition that the scientific method was, to a significant degree, the result not of logic, but of a fever dream, an experience of exactly the sort that our cultural and scientific bias has taught us to shun.  One of our reasons for recounting this dream is to raise the question of what it might imply if this is true.

THE MAN WHO DREAMED UP SCIENCE

It is rare indeed for historians to pinpoint a great cultural turning point to a specific date and locale, and rarer still for them to agree about the meaning of philosophical discoveries.  But modern historians concur that over three and a half centuries ago, in a day of thinking and a night of dreaming, a twenty­three-year-old soldier-philosopher succeeded in reforming the entire structure of Western knowledge by setting down the foundations of a new philosophy, science, mathematics - and a new way of thinking about the world.
In 1619, in a form revealed by his visions and shaped by his labors, Rene Descartes set down four rules for applying his new method for finding truth:

1. Never to accept anything for true which I do not clearly know to be such.

2. Divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible.

3. Begin with the simplest and easiest and then work step by step to the more complex.

4. Make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I might be assured that nothing is omitted.

These rules and the entire Discourse on Method constituted a one-man watershed in the history of thought.  Together with the thoughts and writings of other men in other countries at about the same time - Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon among them - Descartes created the foundation of modern rationalism.  The impact of Descartes' work on the world of his time was summarized by Jane Muir in Of Men and Numbers (Dodd Mead, 1966, p.47):

Truth lay just around the corner like a veiled statue waiting for men to uncover it.  The causes and effects of everything from comets to heart palpitations could be made known, and, in Descartes' words, men would soon be "the lords and possessors of nature.  "
This was the epic scale on which Descartes dreamed.  He had discovered a wonderful new method for discerning the truth - a method totally different from the ones men had been using.  It was to apply the method of mathematics to every area of life.  By using logic, step by step, all the secrets of nature could be laid bare.  And with knowledge would come control.
Today, three hundred years later, when men can cause rain to fall, plants to grow, or fatal diseases to disappear, the idea of mastering nature or of understanding the universe ­ from the molecule to the moon - does not seem so new and wonderful.  But three hundred years ago, the idea that man might actually control nature was either unimaginable or sacrilegious or both.  It was arrogating God's power.  Yet Descartes, with a handful of other men - Francis Bacon being the most famous - dared to think along this truly originnal line.  And slowly, bit by bit, man has made himself lord and possessor of nature.

Descartes was one of those rare cases where an entire civilization adopted a new way of seeing the world at the instigation of one person.  Others added important refinements to his "method" - but the very idea of applying a single, agreed­upon method to the quest for truth was revolutionary.  Others took up the task of reforming the knowledge system of the day, turning attention away from logics and theologies and toward direct observations of nature.  The grand unification of the sciences he predicted was fulfilled beyond the original seer's wildest dreams - and as we shall see, he went in for some wild dreams.
The success of this method, especially when it was turned to the ends Francis Bacon urged - the control of nature, the "wresting of her secrets" through the disciplined use of human minds - became the ideological framework for science, and led to the marvelously effective technology used to build the world that grew up around science.  Taken together, the method, the reformation, the unification, and the practical goal constitute what has been called "the Cartesian worldview." In many ways, the actions of the people who adopted this world­view constructed the world we live in today.
Now that the problems of Western industrial society have become more evident, and the unpleasant, possibly fatal side­effects of controlling nature by an uncontrolled science are becoming more widely known, the old concept of "man conquering nature" has come under fire from some critics.  A few have gone to the extreme of denouncing scientific, analytic, "Cartesian" thought as the primary cause of global problems.  An inward but by no means falsely modest person, Descartes himself would have been most amused to learn that people would be debating the impact of his ideas three and a half centuries
in the future.
Rene Descartes was born to a noble French family in 1596, and at the age of ten commenced his studies of what was then the totality of Western knowledge - logic, ethics, metaphysics, literature, history, science, and mathematics.  Since there had been few experimental scientists to speak about since the fall of Rome, a great deal of this education had to do with memorizing what the Greeks and Romans had to say.  Descartes wasn't entirely convinced that this was all there was to learn about the world.  In fact, at the age of eighteen, he declared that the whole educational scheme was a farce, since the only certainty he had attained in eight years of schooling was a knowledge of his own ignorance, and of the limitations of the known systems of gathering and validating knowledge.
At that time, if a young French gentleman didn't study the classics, he studied law, so Descartes studied law for two years in Poitiers.  As soon as he attained his degree, he declared law to be as intellectually bankrupt as the rest of Western knowledge, and set off for Paris, where he met notable
success - as a gambler.
Anyone who twice rejects the fruits of years of education, declaring them inadequate to satisfy his need for knowledge, is a person who thinks highly of his own intellectual abilities.  Eventually, it dawned on Descartes that if nobody else was going to think about making a little progress beyond what Aristotle knew about things, it would have to be him.
Renouncing his decadent social life as abruptly as he had renounced his earlier schooling, Descartes retired, at the age of twenty, to explore the limits of knowledge on his own.  He literally disappeared from sight, leaving no forwarding address.  His methodology, from the beginning, was unorthodox, and would have outraged many modern proponents of the scientific method: It had long been his habit to linger half the day in bed, thinking - an indulgence he continued through mucch of his life.  Indeed, it has been said that Descartes later invented analytic geometry while watching a fly crawl on the ceiling.
After two years of this reclusive regimen, an old friend succeeded in tracking down the reclining gentleman-philoso­pher, and persuaded him to return to normal society, albeit briefly.  The other young aristocrats of his circle were hardly likely to appreciate the progress he felt he was making in his thought-project.  There was an amazing lack of system to what his teachers had tried to pass off as knowledge, he had been thinking.  There were many explorations of the unknown recorded in the books he read, and many little bits of knowledge scattered sparsely through those books.  But there was no method for gathering and making sense of it all.
As was the custom for young gentlemen of his age and class, Descartes volunteered for the army of the Prince of Nassau (confessing to a friend that he was hardly aware of what side he was expected to fight on, and who he was expected to fight) and was eventually ordered to Germany, where the Thirty Years' War was underway.  Although his external circumstances had changed abruptly, his intellectual journey continued to carry him further into unknown territory.
At that point in his life, Descartes was making monumental breakthroughs in mathematics, and steady progress but no real breakthroughs in his search for a new method of finding knowledge.  Military service, apparently, was no cause for suspending his intellectual endeavors.  Quartered in the town of Ulm for the winter, awaiting the resumption of hostilities in the Spring, Descartes moved toward his moment of noetic thunder.
The night of November 10, 1619, found Descartes in an overheated room, virtually feverish with "enthusiasm" about the intellectual adventure upon which he had embarked.  Descartes wrote much of his journal in Latin (and it is worth remarking that the meaning of en theos - the root of enthusiasm - is "God within").  That night he dreamed three dreams, sleep images of such staggering import that he took care to write out detailed descriptions.
To the modem reader, the contents of the dreams may appear to be relatively mundane, but Descartes was convinced that these enigmatic images held the key to his quest for a new kind of knowledge.
In the first dream episode, he experienced strong winds blowing him away from a church building toward a group of people who didn't appear to be affected by the gale.  After this image, Descartes awoke and prayed for protection against the bad effects of the dream.  Falling asleep again, he was then filled with terror by a burst of noise like a bolt of lightning, and dreaming that he was awake, saw a shower of sparks fill his room.  In the third and final dream of the series, Descartes saw himself holding a dictionary and some papers, one of which contained a poem beginning with the words "What path shall I follow in life?" An unknown man handed him a fragment of verse - the words "Est et Non" caught the dreamer's mind's eye.
At the end of the third dream came an even more extraordinary state of consciousness - a dream within a dream.  Descartes dreamed he awoke to the fact that the shower of sparks in his room was in reality a dream, and then he dreamed that he interpreted the previous dream!
In the dreamed interpretation, Descartes explained to himself that the dictionary represented the future unity of science-" all the various sciences grouped together"; the sheaf of poems symbolized the linkage of philosophy and wisdom; "Est et Non" signified "Truth and Falsity in human attainment and in secular sciences."
In his journals, Descartes revealed that he took the overall meaning of the dreams to be that he was the person destined to reform knowledge and unify the sciences, that the search for truth should be his career, and that his thoughts of the previous months - about knowledge and methods and a unifying system - were to become the foundation of a new method for finding the truth.
Rene Descartes' diary entry for that day has since become famous.  It confidently proclaimed that he had constructed a universally applicable tool for finding truth, and had answered his dissatisfaction with the previous history of Western thought by building the foundations of "an admirable science" which could proceed beyond the boundaries of existing methods of inquiry.
"I begin to understand the foundations of a wonderful discovery ... all the sciences are interconnected as by a chain; no one of them can be completely grasped without taking in the whole encyclopaedia at once," he wrote, turning from his dream directly to the beginning of the work that has come to us as The Discourse on Method, but which was originally titled: "Project of a Universal Science Destined to Raise Our Nature to Its Highest Degree of Perfection."
If that brilliant young aristocrat had not dreamed those three curious dreams of November 10, 1619, the course of science and Western civilization would have been significantly different.  But on that winter evening in Germany, during a lull between battles in a particularly vicious war, the inner and outer spheres of knowledge met for a moment in the mind of a particular human being.  A surprisingly large portion of the world we inhabit at this moment stems from that moment.
The dream of Descartes is an important episode in the secret history of inspiration, for it represents a milestone in the institutionalization of the taboo against inner knowing - and, ironically, also represents a prime example of the potential power of the same inner knowledge.  Although the ideas that manifested in that moment appear to have been apprehended in an altered state of consciousness, and involved non-rational means of "knowing," a direct consequence of the revelation was the growth of rational, reductionist, positivist science ­ the same institution that later questioned the validity of "subjective knowledge."
There has been no argument, even from the most conservative historians, about the fact that Descartes' dreams did occur on the same day as his epochal journal entries.  His own account attributes the inspiration for his "admirable science" to these dreams.  In fact, Descartes stated that the dream was the most decisive event in his life, and proclaimed his intention to make a pilgrimage from Venice to Lorette as an act of thanksgiving for this supernatural guidance.
Upon reflection, it is odd that the dream-origins of modern thought are but a footnote to history.  While Descartes' more useful ideas were adopted wholeheartedly, the reaction to their source was savagely negative.  Descartes himself noted the deep importance of his dream images as well as his calculations and logical operations as tools for constructing the method.  But few of his contemporaries would accept the anomaly of the dream-knowledge.
When Baillet's Life of M. Descartes was first published, August Comte (the originator of the philosophy of positivism) referred to that fateful night as a "cerebral episode." Christian Huygens, a towering scientific figure of the day, at the urging of the equally monumental Gottfried Leibniz, wrote: "The passage in which he relates how his brain was overstimulated and in a fit state for visions, and his vow to Our Lady of Lorette, shows great weakness...." Baillet himself tried to reduce the embarrassing illumination to a case of nervous exhaustion: "He tired himself to such an extent that his brain became over­heated and he fell into a kind of rapture which so worked upon his already exhausted spirit that it became predisposed to the reception of dreams and visions."
Suffice it to note that Descartes engaged in a long, intense period of preparatory thought before his night of revelation, that the insights came in a series of images, one of which was the image of a bolt of lightning, and the message not only addressed broad, abstract topics like the search for truth, but directly addressed the question of what the dreamer should do with his life.
One reason we have dwelt on this tale is to draw attention to the non-rational moments at the very foundations of science.  But the fact that the new method of thought Descartes dreamed up evolved into a belief system known as contemporary science is also important to our discussion.  Science is not a static edifice, built out of facts piled up like so many bricks, but is in fact a way of looking at the world, a perspective that changes from time to time.  This fact was not a popular thought in science until very recently.
The psychological aspects of the process of science only became a subject of critical inquiry after Thomas Kuhn's 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  In that book, Kuhn challenged the then dominant view that scientific progress is a simple cumulative process.  He did this by introducing the notion of "paradigm." In the sense that Kuhn meant it, paradigms are the systems of common assumptions that scientists (and others) share about the meaning of problems they consider.  To a scientist, or a citizen of a society, a "dominant paradigm" might not even be consciously articulated, but it is nonetheless a basic way of perceiving, thinking, valuing, and doing, associated with a particular vision of reality.
A dominant paradigm is seldom if ever stated explicitly; it exists as an unquestioned, tacit understanding that is transmitted through the culture and to succeeding generations through direct experience (rather than being "taught").  A paradigm cannot be defined precisely in a few well-chosen sentences.  In fact, it is not something to be expressed verbally at all.  It is what the anthropologist hopes to understand after he or she has lived in a foreign culture for a long time - what the natives in a society perceive with their eyes and value with their feelings.  A dominant paradigm encompasses more than an ideology or a world view but less than a total culture.
Other social scientists and historians such as Lewis Mumford, Arnold Toynbee, and Fred Polak, whose ideas will be discussed in other chapters, have pointed out the ways in which civilization-wide paradigms sometimes undergo rapid, violent transformations.  The breakdown of the industrial-era paradigm and its replacement by another would be accompanied by drastic changes in our society's operative values and institutions.  More profoundly, it would involve a change in the basic perception of reality.
We recall our definition of the social paradigm as "the basic way of perceiving, thinking, valuing, and doing, associated with a particular vision of reality." It is change in that vision of reality that is the hallmark of the historically rare fundamental transformations of civilizations.
We have noted a close relationship between three kinds of paradigm-shifts that appear to be in the process of occurring: First, there is a change of paradigm in the sciences involved with the study of human nature, a shift to a way of seeing the world that no longer excludes those profound experiences that are difficult to quantify but which seem to be the source of our most deeply held values.  Second is the paradigm shift within individuals - the breakthrough experience ­ that often precedes and accompanies the attainment of higher knowledge and capabilities.  Last is the most important transformation, the system-wide transformation of our society, which we think is closely related to the other two varieties of paradigm-shift.