There is an old parable, originally from the Indian subcontinent, but adopted by many other cultures. It goes like this:
Six blind men came upon an elephant in the dimness of their unseeing world.
Each reached out with curious hands, eager to grasp the nature of this strange beast.One, stroking its broad, solid flank, declared: “It is a wall, firm and unyielding.”
Another, feeling the smooth curve of a tusk, countered: “No, it is a spear, sharp and deadly.”
A third, clasping the restless trunk, cried: “It is a serpent, coiling and alive.”
The fourth, brushing the great ear, smiled: “Surely it is a fan, wide and gentle.”
The fifth, embracing a sturdy leg, proclaimed: “It is a tree, rooted in the earth.”
The last, tugging at the tail, laughed: “It is a rope, rough and dangling.”So they quarrelled without end, each certain of his truth, each blind to the others’.
In this essay, the elephant is reality itself. All previous societies tried to describe it, many believed they had succeeded, and some of them had a firmer grasp on crucial parts of the puzzle than we do. What no previous society had was modern science and technology, so their understanding of reality can only have been based on a mixture of experience, reason, faith and revelation. We are now in possession of a vast amount of reliable information about how reality works, all of which must be taken into account. Unfortunately, science doesn't describe the whole elephant either – it is nowhere near providing a coherent, integrated model of reality, even by its own limited illumination. And while neither faith nor revelation can contribute anything useful to a new foundational paradigm, both reason and experience are indispensable, although neither of them qualify as science. Just because an item of knowledge can be acquired before any science begins, or can only obtained subjectively if it can be obtained at all, it doesn't follow that it is as irrelevant as faith and revelation. We don't need science to tell us we are conscious, for example. In fact, science can't tell us this. If we want to know if someone is conscious, we must ask them and evaluate their answer.
Science isn't just one of the blind men but several. Cosmology isn't integrated with quantum mechanics, and neither of them make firm contact with any theory of consciousness. Even within these great areas of academic study there is profound disagreement about central questions. Science doesn't know what consciousness is, and doesn't know what quantum mechanics means, and our best cosmological model, which goes by the not-so-snappy name of Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), has got more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. There is deep confusion about the expansion rate of the universe, the cosmological constant problem is the biggest discrepancy in the history of physics, we don't understand what gravity is, we can't adequately explain why the early universe was so exceptionally uniform or why the constants are fine-tuned for life, and while our theories suggests that life should be abundant in the cosmos, we can find no sign of it anywhere but Earth. However, what really damns ΛCDM is the direction of travel. It becomes ever more precise (frequently at vast public expense) but instead of leading to solutions to the biggest problems it regularly reveals new ones. Meanwhile, the discrepancies we're already aware of are being measured to ever greater resolutions, as if higher precision could somehow compensate for a lack of fundamental insight. As things stand, ΛCDM cannot even be relied on as an accurate account of just one of the elephant's body parts, let alone the whole thing. Something is fundamentally wrong with it, and cosmologists don't know what. Almost all of their new ideas are proposals for yet more ad-hoc additions to ΛCDM, rather than something that could replace it wholesale. In other words, we are justified in believing ΛCDM is the best materialistic theory available, but as things stand, it is empirically inadequate. Very literally, today's cosmologists cannot find an elegant and parsimonious way to make their numbers add up, and in some situations they can't make them add up at all.
The other blind men, of course, are philosophy and religion. Western philosophy, split into its Analytic and Continental traditions, has long grappled with the elephant by way of reason alone. Analytic philosophers try to tame it with language and logic, dissecting concepts as if the creature could be understood by cataloguing the texture of its skin or the angle of its bones. Meanwhile the Continental philosophers, after much struggling, eventually threw up their hands and declared that the very idea of a single, unified model of reality is not just a wild goose chase but a despicable form of oppression. They tell us we must just resign ourselves to epistemic chaos, and celebrate the diversity of “mini-narratives”, even if they directly contradict each other or don't even make sense on their own.
Which naturally brings us to religion. The Abrahamic traditions gave us stories of creation, covenant, and salvation, and declared the elephant to be the finest possible work a transcendent lawgiver. Eastern mystical traditions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism – sought instead to dissolve the boundaries of perception, to experience the elephant from within, as an inseparable flow of being and consciousness. These perspectives uncovered profound truths, but as things stand, there is no successful integration of these insights with our scientific models of the structure of reality.
Few people have even attempted a full synthesis of science and spirituality, though there have been some notable exceptions. Ken Wilber is the best known living example, and if I'm looking for recent historic examples then I'd choose three who articulated visions as the quantum age was being born and three from the later 20th century, The three earlier thinkers were responding to the same predicament that QM itself exposed: the breakdown of mechanistic materialism. All three lived through the initial quantum revolution. They can be seen as the first wave of integral cosmologists anticipating what the quantum paradigm would eventually demand: a participatory, processual, value-laden universe.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a philosopher of process thought, who saw reality as a "web of becoming" where science, philosophy, and religion interpenetrate. Science and the Modern World (1925) was written as quantum theory was coalescing, and Process and Reality (1929) came two years after the Solvay Conference where Bohr and Einstein debated the meaning of quantum indeterminacy. Many modern process philosophers interpret Whitehead’s thought as a philosophical parallel to quantum ontology, even though he developed it independently.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was Indian philosopher-yogi who sought a synthesis of Eastern spirituality with Western evolutionary thought. His main metaphysical synthesis was underway before QM’s formal development but was revised during 1930s. Aurobindo’s ontology of reality as a dynamic manifestation of consciousness, with matter as involved spirit, mirrors quantum indeterminacy’s dissolution of fixed matter. He was spiritually articulating the same shift from substance to process and from object to participation that physics was uncovering empirically.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was more influenced by Darwinian and thermodynamic cosmology than by QM. He developed his evolutionary cosmology during the 1930s–40s, and like the quantum pioneers, he saw consciousness and complexity as integral to the fabric of evolution. His cosmogenesis anticipated the idea of a participatory universe that later physicists would develop explicitly under quantum influence.
The later three each deepened the integration of scientific and spiritual cosmology in ways that directly reflected the maturing quantum and ecological worldviews of their time. If the first three thinkers anticipated the quantum shift philosophically, this later trio sought to live within it – to think from inside a participatory cosmos rather than about it from the outside.
Thomas Berry (1914–2009), a cultural historian and eco-theologian, gave this participatory cosmology its most elegant expression in the phrase, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Berry’s vision placed the human story within the larger unfolding of the cosmos, framing the ecological crisis as a crisis of cosmology – a breakdown in our sense of participation in the great story of creation. He called for a new cosmological narrative, inspired by the emerging insights of systems theory, deep ecology, and quantum interconnectedness. For Berry, science and spirituality are not separate enterprises but two modes of intimacy with the same sacred reality.
David Bohm (1917–1992), a theoretical physicist and close associate of Einstein, provided the most rigorous scientific articulation of this participatory worldview. His theory of the implicate order proposed that the manifest world (the explicate order) unfolds from a deeper, undivided wholeness. In this hidden dimension, every part "enfolds" the whole, and consciousness participates in the "unfolding" process itself. Bohm’s dialogues with Jiddu Krishnamurti and his later work on thought, meaning, and creativity show how far he extended physics into the domain of metaphysics and spirituality. He attempted to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, offering a scientific expression of the same participatory ontology that others on this list approached through philosophy and theology. However, Bohm's system is entirely deterministic, and I believe it evades, rather than solves, the measurement problem.
Henryk Skolimowski (1930–2018) was a Polish philosopher of eco-cosmology who developed what he called an “eco-philosophy of participatory mind.” Trained in both science and philosophy, he argued that the universe is not a mindless mechanism but a meaningful, evolving field of consciousness in which human awareness participates creatively. He saw the ecological crisis as a spiritual and epistemological failure: the direct result of viewing the world as dead matter. His alternative was a sacred cosmology grounded in reverence for life and participation in the cosmic process of meaning-making. In this sense, he extended the implications of quantum indeterminacy and observer participation into the moral and ecological domain, proposing that the universe itself is a value-realising system.
Together, these three thinkers represent a second wave of integrative cosmology, which moved beyond mere synthesis toward a new worldview in which science itself becomes a spiritual practice in itself. Each, in his own way, recognised that the participatory universe implied by quantum theory and ecology is not only a description of reality but a call to responsibility: to awaken, to participate, and to co-create the next phase of the cosmic story.
There is one other person I cannot leave unmentioned, because he was such an important influence in my own case. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) served as the great communicator of this integrative turn. Through works like The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and Island (1962), he distilled the insights of both Eastern mysticism and Western science into a vision of the universe as mind in evolution. Though less a cosmological system-builder than the others I have mentioned here, Huxley did more than anybody else to transmit the participatory worldview to modern culture, making the cosmic synthesis accessible to the broader imagination.
The ideas I wish to explore are related to the thinking of all of these individuals, as well as some more recent thinkers whose work focused on getting specific parts of the picture more into focus – most notably philosopher Thomas Nagel and physicist Henry Stapp. Between them, Stapp's Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007) and Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialistic Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012) provided me with a new vision of the picture of on the box. On their own, neither would have been enough.
I am an ex-materialist. Once upon a time, in what now seems like a previous life, I was the administrator for the newly-created bulletin board of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Around the same time, I arrived at the conclusion that materialism doesn't actually make any sense, because the only way to make it internally coherent is to deny that the word “consciousness” refers to anything real. This is known as "eliminative materialism" (or just “eliminativism”) and its logical consistency does nothing to diminish its absurdity: the truth is that it is only through consciousness that we are aware that anything exists at all. That was back in 2002, and I have spent much of the intervening period both exploring what a coherent post-materialistic model of reality might actually look like, and trying to find ways to prise open the minds of people who think like I did until my “defection to the light side” at the age of 33. The first activity has proved very rewarding...eventually; 25 years later I am ready to tell a new story. The second turned out to be almost impossible. I found a way to break out of a materialistic belief system, but nobody could have broken in and rescued me from it, not least because I did not feel I was in any need of rescue.
This raises an obvious question. If materialism can be falsified with a combination of pure reason and an acknowledgement of the reality of consciousness then why has it retained its position as the dominant metaphysical ideology of modernity? Why hasn't it been displaced by a new paradigm? On one level the answer is simple: there is no coherent new paradigm to displace it. Materialists typically frame the situation as a straight choice between materialism (which they assume to be an unproblematic default starting premise) and dualism (which is what you inevitably end up with if you add something to materialism). Meanwhile, very few people who reject materialism actually claim to be (or should I say “admit to being”) a dualist. Some call themselves “non-dualists” in order to ram this point home, although that term has many different meanings. The clear positions opposed to materialism could be categorised into three main groups: idealists (who believe consciousness is everything), panpsychists (who believe everything is conscious), and “other / don't knows” (mostly people who understand what is wrong with materialism, but aren't convinced idealism or panpsychism are true either, usually because they consider brains to be necessary for consciousness even if insufficient). To materialists, all of it looks like woo, and because there are multiple incompatible alternatives on offer, nothing changes. It's a stalemate: unresolvable metaphysical trench warfare.
That said, there are quite a few parts of this new paradigm coming into focus. Based on the current state of books written on this topic the “whole elephant” should look something like this:
In one sentence the missing paradigm is a participatory, meaning-infused, relational cosmology where mind, matter, time, and life are continuous aspects of one living process: the universe as a communion of subjects.
This is a pretty good start. But if we can get this far, why can't we find a way to agree on the details to a sufficient extent that a coherent new paradigm can emerge, and begin the process of displacing materialism? Is it simply because not enough people have got the message? I don't think so. I think that if a proposed new paradigm actually had enough inter-disciplinary explanatory power, then the paradigms would already be shifting. Something must therefore be missing, and whatever it is has got to be as elegant and conceptually simple as shifting the centre of the Solar System from Earth to the Sun. Is it possible that there is some relatively simple way of re-arranging the puzzle pieces so that everything makes sense in a radically new way? And if so, why haven't we already figured out what it is? Why can't we just get an AI to analyse the whole situation (at which it is apparently so astonishingly effective), and come up with the correct answer?
My answer is this: if we accept that reality is coherent, consistent and comprehensible then it is not possible for the idealists, panpsychists and “other / don't know's” all to be correct. If there actually is a whole elephant then two of those groups will necessarily have to join the materialists in accepting that some of their foundational beliefs need to change. In fact, this sort of situation applies to just about every Western mind currently in existence: as things stand there is no serious candidate for the right answer, so each of us is free to believe whatever we like, and we can justify this at no cost by saying, and fully meaning, that we believe it to be the least bad option on the table. Collectively, this situation suits us. We like it. Sure, it might lead to arguments and meaninglessness, but it is the ultimate manifestation of an individualistic theme that has always run through Western societies. At this point I start to wonder who is left that will still want to consider something radical enough to power a paradigm shift of the magnitude required. Is the loss of a wide variety of incoherent worldviews a price worth paying for a coherent model of the whole of reality?
Most people do not understand the severity of this situation, and therefore neither accept it as normal nor view it as a problem. The fundamental fragmentation – the incoherence between science, philosophy, and spirituality regarding the nature of reality – is primarily an internal crisis debated within academic and intellectual circles. Most people live with an implicit, common-sense materialism (the world is made of stuff, and my mind is in my head) that is never challenged or explicitly articulated. As for the cosmological crisis, while the public enjoys popular science books about the Big Bang and Dark Matter, they generally absorb ΛCDM as a settled scientific fact, not a structure riddled with fundamental, widening cracks. The consensus is presented, the confusion is not. The problems with QM have seeped into public consciousness, but often in a distorted, pseudoscientific fashion. People know about "quantum weirdness" and superposition, and have heard about the controversial role of the observer, but this is often misinterpreted as proof of whatever belief they already hold, rather than understood to be the precise, century-old conceptual failure of the dominant physical theory that it actually is.
The fragmentation is therefore normalised. The most relevant public awareness is not of the academic theoretical problems, but of the consequences for society in general: the lack of a shared, coherent story for living. The average person expects to choose from a variety of belief systems. The idea of a single, coherent model that integrates all these domains is not a common expectation. Meaninglessness is also accepted. Ours is an era of epistemic relativism ("my truth" vs. "your truth") where people think it is normal that collective, objective meaning is impossible. This nihilism, paradoxically, has also become a normalised part of the modern condition. The intellectual stalemate is felt as a kind of cultural and spiritual drift, but the cause is unknown. A coherent model of reality would demand intellectual honesty and a willingness to surrender cherished fragments of supposed truth that no longer fit any potential whole. That’s a tall order. Many people (spiritual seekers, materialists and postmodernists alike) have built their identities around their preferred paradoxes. These contradictions aren’t just tolerated; they’re celebrated as signs of depth or sophistication. Incoherence offers freedom from commitment (you can dabble in ideas without being bound by them), immunity to critique (if your worldview is self-consciously paradoxical, it can’t be “wrong”) and aesthetic appeal (contradictions feel poetic, mysterious, even sacred). Coherence threatens all that. It threatens the buffet of metaphysical options that lets each person pick their own flavour of reality. Except, ironically, the freedom to believe in nonsense is itself a kind of tyranny. It problematises shared understanding, undermines trust in reason, and makes collective meaning-making nearly impossible. We end up with epistemic relativism, cultural nihilism and philosophical gridlock: no paradigm shift can occur because every worldview is protected by the general epistemic anarchy. In this light, coherence is liberation. It’s the promise of a worldview that works, that adds up, that honours experience without collapsing into chaos. What we actually fear is the loss of our metaphysical playground, and I think that fear is misplaced. A coherent model of reality doesn’t have to be rigid or reductive, and it certainly doesn't have to be authoritarian. What it can’t be is endlessly self-contradictory. So is the loss of all those incoherent worldviews worth it? I’d say: only if the new paradigm is rich enough to absorb their insights without their contradictions. The challenge is replacing the menu with something better.
There is a new story available, and it does satisfy the description of the whole elephant given above, but it does so in a way that almost nobody is expecting. And if you think about it, then I hope you'll agree that it always had to be that way.
For a free PDF of the book this was taken from, go here.