Alan Wallace

Religious Studies
University of California Santa Barbara

"The Retinal Blind Spot in the Scientific Vision of Our Origins"

From the time of Copernicus, Western science has looked outward in its pursuit of knowledge of the natural world, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that the universe consists essentially of physical phenomena and their properties. As a result of this ideal of objective knowledge of objective reality--together with a taboo against subjective knowledge of subjective realities--an empirical science of the mind was not begun until some three hundred years after the Scientific Revolution. By then, the physical sciences had advanced so far that some prominent scientists thought their knowledge of the universe was already complete in all its essentials. For a hundred years after the inception of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, consciousness itself continued to be largely ignored by the cognitive sciences. Thus, in its vision of cosmogony and the evolution of life, science has blinded itself to the role of consciousness in the natural world. Rather than knowledge of the origins, nature, and potentials of consciousness, science presents us with a mass of assumptions often presented in the guise of established fact. As the eminent historian Daniel Boorstein comments: the major impediment to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusions of knowledge.

Alan Wallace

Trained for ten years in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland, Alan Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976; and he has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama.

After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University.

He has edited, translated, authored, or contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, as well as the interface between religion and science. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is launching one program in Tibetan Buddhist studies and another in science and religion.

His published works include The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Buddhist Meditation, Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind, and Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up. In June of this year his forthcoming book The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness will be published by Oxford University Press.