I did some experiments to explore communication between two cultures of single-celled algae that glow. When I disturbed one of them with a chemical stressor, it emitted a burst of light. Almost simultaneously, the second culture that was in a separate container emitted light too. You could see it with your eyes. It was almost as if it was communicating with the first culture. After doing experiments like that for a month, I am intrigued that there is something here.

I think the idea of this biophoton field is just an indicator of some some deeper field in the organism. When an organism dies, it gives up a burst of light. There have also been a lot of interesting findings by German and Japanese researchers that would seem to echo some of the old Hindu ideas about the chakras. Researchers have discovered, for example, that the areas near the forehead, throat and heart have increased photon emission compared to non-chakra regions of the body.

So there's been a number of research laboratories documenting that there are energy dynamics associated with the body which seem to support the wisdom of ancient cultures. To me, this convergence of the new information from frontier science and old perennial wisdom is fascinating.

DiCarlo: You have mentioned that there are certain scientists who are arrogant and perhaps closed minded. What do you feel are the essential qualities and characteristics that make for a good scientist?

Rubik: I think it is very important to neither be believer nor a disbeliever. It's a very narrow line to stand on, but I think the best position to be with respect to old data and new data-the mainstream thinking and the frontier thinking-is to stand on the fine line between them. This is the position of the non-believer. But at the same time try to stay open. I want to ask as many questions as possible which challenges all sides-mainstream, frontier and even fringe ideas. Unfortunately, that's not a popular place to be. When I put myself in that place and go the mainstream, they often accuse me of being too frontier. When I go to the frontier science meetings and challenge them with questions, they accuse me of being too mainstream. But it's really the best place to be because you don't stop asking questions. Science is driven by questions and we must never stop asking questions. I feel where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. We can never say, "We now we have it . This is the truth." This is the problem even with the frontier scientists-many have become true believers in a particular system. I've actually encountered violence while I attended the meetings of some groups. One individual threw a journal in my face in response to my question. He got so upset because he was a true believer. I began to understand he wasn't interested in bridging his work to the mainstream of everyday science. He, and others like him, want to be seen as mavericks bucking the system.

That's definitely one type of frontier scientist. Others would like to see their work merged into the mainstream, but they don't know how to do it. They often take an intense fighting posture in their writing and language and instead of building bridges they actually cut themselves off. I see various different ways in which people destroy their chances of trying to bring their work into the mainstream, but usually it's because of an, "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude. Anytime we have that, I think we lose the art of being a scientist, which is never to believe in what you have have found. Science is about being humble rather than being arrogant, because you know that what you have found is only part of an even bigger picture and that there are many, many more questions that will lead to an even greater unfolding of our knowledge. I believe that our science will never be complete, because I think as God's creation, it is deep and unfathomable, like divinity.

Over a 100 years ago, one of the Deans of Harvard University said our science is nearly complete and he tried to discourage students from going into science as he felt there was nothing more to do. That was before quantum and relativity theory! This notion has come up over and over again in history and the present is no different. We think it's almost finished now-we just need a unified field theory and that's it folks-we have everything. I think this is nonsense. We should be encouraging all of our students not to memorize and regurgitate scientific dogma, but to ask new questions. We should ask them to go inside themselves and rely on their own intuition and come up with their own personal questions to ask of nature. I think that nature is so complex and creatively evolving that if all of us were asking questions, we would never unfold all the available knowledge. But of course, that's more of a religious belief on my part. I see that nature is filled with divinity and being filled with divinity, it is infinitely complex. So we will never know it all, but we have to keep asking new questions.

DiCarlo: I'm wondering what role does the inner state of the scientist play in experimentation in scientific inquiry?

Rubik: I think that our inner state and our own beliefs and ideas, the things that make us unique, contribute to the specific questions we pose in science and determine the kinds of things we are going to see in the world. We are all looking for self-reflections of who we are, perhaps that is all we can really "see." I'll give you an example. I know an Italian physicist who is a Marxist that also believes that collective human behavior makes for good societies. When he looks at atoms and molecules he "sees" that they behave cooperatively. As a result, he asks questions relative to the cooperative behaviors of atoms and molecules.

DiCarlo: Well is it conceivable that our beliefs could actually affect the outcomes of our scientific experiments?

Rubik: Yes. There are some very famous examples of that historically. I'll mention one for you. It's really one of the most outrageous. One of the most famous microphysicists in the history of science was the 17th Century Dutchman named Van Leeuwenhoek. He and his contemporaries were among the first few people to look through a microscope. When they looked at human sperm, they saw, inside the heads of the sperm, little babies. Now that's a wild idea. Today we no longer see little babies, but everybody saw little babies inside the sperm heads at this time because the world view for 2,000 years up to that time was that men planted little babies inside the bodies of women where they incubated until birth. Of course, they were going to see little babies in the sperm and everybody agreed it was so. They were even comparing the little babies, one from another under the microscope. I mean it's amazing that they all saw this simply because everybody believed it. It just shows you the power of collective expectation and belief, of intersubjective consensus, and how it can influence what a whole society perceives.

I wonder today what collective beliefs we share that force us to see data in a certain configuration because we cannot divorce ourselves from certain beliefs. What questions do we dare not pose about nature because they would so threaten our own beliefs? We should look deeply inside ourselves regarding these things, but it's very had to do. It's very hard to step outside of our own culture, with all its underlying assumptions, beliefs and expectations, to do this. That's why I think it's important for scientists to meditate and to enter the void of their own minds to be able to transcend some of their own shortcomings as individuals within their communities.

In the deepest sense, true scientists are really mystics and I don't mean that in the trivial sense, such as in gazing into a crystal ball to foretell the future. I mean that they are on the road to inner, self-awareness and development of their full human potential. Because of this, their questions about nature will change as they themselves change. The real act of being, let's say, a yogi of knowledge-which the scientist is-is to know thyself. I think that's one of the first premises. I think it's human nature that we project what's inside ourselves out into the cosmos. We project it externally and then we think it's objective, but really it's only a means of letting us see more of who we are inside, and working out our interior problems in the external world.

DiCarlo: What are the three frontier areas of science telling us?

Rubik: They tell us that there is a new paradigm emerging. It's not yet finished, and everybody has a slightly different version of what it looks like, but the paradigm is about the new views of life in the whole universe. The whole universe itself, the whole cosmos, is a living, dynamical being. The universe is not just a clockwork mechanism. It has creativity built into it . It's changing, it's dynamic, it's evolving more complexity and more richness and beauty all of the time.

We're coming to realize that life wasn't just something that happened once on this tiny planet. We shouldn't think that we are that special in the universe. The universe was destined to produce conscious life from its very inception. There's a lot of factors that entered into the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang, onwards and the factors were coordinated just precisely so that we have an interesting living universe. It could have expanded into a dust cloud, or collapsed back into a speck of dust, but the dynamics were so balanced that it initially produced heavy elements, eventually planets and then life forms. Eventually conscious life forms developed.

In my view, the universe actually had some rudimentary consciousness from its inception. This whole question of, "Is mind separate from matter", or "when did consciousness begin?" to me is a moot question. I really think that consciousness was always there and the evolution toward greater consciousness was purposefully built into the cosmic design. Now that becomes almost a religious issue, but that's my own position on it and in my view, the emerging paradigm is really telling us that life has a lot of subtle characteristics that involve numerous relationships. An organism is dynamic. It has energy properties that have not yet been considered very much. Life is linked in its many rhythms to the earth, biosphere,the sun, and even the cosmos at large. So the emerging paradigm considers life to be a deep principal of the universe. It's the primary principal. We exist in a nurturing, caring universe that wanted to develop life from its inception and that can sustain us. Nature is not something we should be fighting against and feeling alienated from but it's very much a part of who we are. If we embrace that point of view-that we exist in a very nurturing place-I think it can lead us to a new renaissance.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who's focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled "The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine" (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.