Goodall’s appeal, though, has always stretched beyond her scientific accomplishments. Partly it stems from those old National Geographic shows of the lone white woman out in the bush with these wild apes. The cultural critic Donna Haraway once wrote, “There could be no better story than that of Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees for narrating the healing touch between nature and society,” though Haraway went on to say that our fascination with Goodall also played on Western stereotypes about Africa: “It is impossible to picture the entwined hands of a white woman and an African ape without evoking the history of racist iconography.”

Goodall has remained a fascinating figure partly because she’s kept one foot outside of mainstream science. She’s an outspoken advocate of animal rights and also the rare scientist who talks openly about mystical experiences — from her transformative encounters in the wild to a ghostly vision she once had of her dead husband. Now 75, Goodall is a larger-than-life figure who looms over the field of primatology. Today she spends less time with her beloved Gombe chimps than traveling the world as a U.N. messenger of peace, campaigning for environmental causes and promoting her Roots and Shoots program for young nature lovers.

 I caught up with Goodall after she received the Leakey Prize, awarded to “scientists who transcend the boundaries of their disciplines.” The prize was fitting since it was famed paleontologist Louis Leakey who first asked Goodall to conduct a field study of chimpanzees. Leakey’s choice was remarkable, as Goodall had not been to college and had no scientific training. As she explains, Leakey picked her “because he wanted to send somebody into the field with an unbiased mind.”

As I’ve read the accounts of your early field work at Gombe, I’m struck by how much time you were out in the field, alone with the chimpanzees.

It was absolutely amazing. It wasn’t only a beautiful place, surrounded by this timeless world, but also, everything I saw with the chimpanzees was new. I mean, how lucky can you get?

Didn’t they just run away from you when you first approached them?

Oh yeah. They’d never seen a white ape before and they were horrified. They vanished into the bushes. Fortunately, one of them — I named him David Greybeard — lost his fear before the others and came to my camp, where he found some bananas. And it was because of him that the others gradually began to lose their fear. So it was as though he helped me open a door into a magic world.

Some of your early discoveries — that chimps can use tools — involved David Greybeard. Can you describe the first day you saw this?

It had been raining. I was pushing through some tall grass and suddenly I saw this dark shape hunched over the golden soil of a termite mound. I peered through the bushes with my binoculars and saw a hand reach out and pick a piece of grass. I could see him pushing it down into the termite mound. After he left, I went over there and saw termites crawling over the surface of the mound. There were stems lying around, so I poked them down and the termites bit on them. A couple of days later, not only did I see David Greybeard using the tools but stripping leaves from a twig, therefore making a tool. That was the exciting thing. Up until then, it was thought that only humans used and made tools. We were defined as man the tool-maker.

You discovered that chimpanzees hunt. Did anyone know this before you saw it?

 No Western scientist knew. I think the local people knew. But it was very exciting the first time I saw it. They hunt young pigs, young bushbuck, and they share the prey after they’ve had a successful hunt. They beg, with gestures like we use. And the meat is shared.

Some years later, you found that chimpanzees can be a lot more aggressive than people had known. Some of your colleagues saw that chimpanzees will even hunt and kill other chimpanzees.

That was disappointing to find that, just like us, they have a dark side. The first accounts were of male chimpanzees patrolling the boundary of their territory and catching a female from a neighboring social group — a stranger — and subjecting her to such a violent attack that she later died of her wounds, and taking her baby and killing it. It was a total shock. Soon after that, the community divided. The smaller group took up residence in the south of the range. And four years later, the males of the larger community systematically hunted down, attacked and killed all of the breakaway males — seven of them, and two females.

These were all chimpanzees that had once lived together. They had been intimate with each other.

It’s like a civil war. And civil wars in human society are the worst. This was horrible.

 How do you explain what happened?

I think it was territorial. The southern community had taken over part of what had once been shared range. As soon as the southern community was annihilated, the northerners moved back into the territory with their females and young. It’s very human, isn’t it?

It must have made you wonder about how violent humans can be. What conclusions did you come to?

When I first started publishing those attacks — that four-year war — various scientists suggested that I didn’t need to publish it. They said that if you publish this, certain people will use this information to show that aggression is hard-wired. Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive. So it goes back to Louis Leakey’s premise when he sent me: If we find behavior common to chimpanzees and humans today, perhaps it was present in our common ancestor 6 million years ago. If that’s so, perhaps violence has been with us all the way through human evolution.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time. Chimpanzees equally show tendencies of love, compassion and altruism, so we have these from our ancient past as well.

It’s striking that Louis Leakey picked three women to lead pioneering primate studies: you with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with gorillas, and Birute Galdikas with orangutans. Was that just coincidence?

No, not at all. He felt that women made better observers, and he liked working better with women. So he deliberately chose women.

Do you think he was right?

If you look at women in an evolutionary perspective — and I compare chimp mothers with human mothers — you find that a mother needs to be patient. Otherwise her children won’t do very well. A woman needed to understand the needs of a nonverbal creature, or our children before they can speak. And women, even if they’ve been subjugated, have been quick to recognize the little communication signals in a household to prevent arguments before they blow up — all to keep children out of the way of irritable men. So all those characteristics would be useful.

And when I began, most women didn’t have careers. So you could afford to go sit in a forest and expect that a white knight would come along with shining armor and gather you up and look after you for the rest of your life. Whereas men, they were the breadwinners. They had to finish their field research, get a PhD and get a job.

There was another convention back in the ’60s. Scientists were not supposed to get emotionally involved with the subjects they studied. It seems that you violated that rule in your study of chimpanzees.

I didn’t know about that when I began. I’d just done biology in high school. But I’d watched animals all my life, long before I watched chimpanzees. And I think having empathy with the creature you’re watching is an immensely powerful tool. It gives you a platform from which you can start asking questions. Especially with chimpanzees, our nervous system is almost identical. Their brain is just a little bit smaller.

You were studying mother-infant interactions of chimpanzees, and then you had a child of your own. You raised him at Gombe while you were doing these field studies. Did you learn anything about raising your own son from the chimpanzees you studied?

I’m quite sure I did. I looked on Flo as a role model. She was patient and supportive. She was protective but not overprotective. She could impose discipline when she wanted. She provided a nice secure base for her kids. And she supported them when they got into difficulties. That’s a hallmark of a good mother. But looking back on it, my own mother raised me much the same way, so I don’t know if I really learned from Flo.

You’ve written about the death of Flo and the impact it had on some of her family members. How did it affect her son Flint?

Flo, at the time of her death, looked older than any other individual we’ve observed at Gombe. She was probably close to 50. Chimpanzees don’t have a menopause, and it’s interesting to consider how useful menopause is in a long-lived species. Because Flo gave birth to an infant when her previous child, Flint, was only 4 and a half, she didn’t have the strength to wean Flint. She didn’t have the strength to nurture this embryo inside her and push Flint toward independence. So when he threw violent tantrums, she allowed him to suckle and ride on her back. And then, when the infant died at 6 months, Flint was still sleeping with her, and she just took him back and treated him as though he was an infant. So he developed this strange, abnormal dependency on his old mother.

When she died, he was 8 and half years old, but it seemed he simply couldn’t cope without her. And he showed signs of clinical depression. He rejected food, he rejected the approaches of other chimps. And in this state, which I can only describe as grief, his immune system weakened. He fell sick and was dead within a month of losing Flo.

He was simply too sad to live anymore.

He was too sad. I’ll never forget seeing him about five or six days after she died. He climbed very slowly up a tree. He was already a little sick, and he got to a nest, which he’d shared with his mother about two weeks earlier. He just stood there looking at that nest. You can only wonder what was going on in his mind. Then he turned around and walked very, very slowly along the branch, climbed down to the ground and curled up in a little heap. It was heartbreaking. We sat with him, we offered him food, but he did get some sickness and we couldn’t help him.

You had known Flo for many years. How did her death affect you?

I sat with her body. We found it at the edge of the stream, and I sat there during the day and also during most of the following night — to see the reaction of other chimpanzees and also, I didn’t want the pigs to eat her. It was like losing an old friend.

Your research showed that chimpanzees have sophisticated emotional and mental capacities, which raises a big question: How unique are human beings?

 It’s the explosive development of our intellect that sets us apart. I personally believe that this happened because we, and only we, have developed the kind of language that enables us to teach about things that are not present, to tell stories, learn from the past, plan the distant future and perhaps most important of all, gather together a group of people to discuss a new idea. That has really stimulated the growth of the intellect.

So if this is what makes us more human than anything else, makes us the most intellectual being that’s ever walked the planet — able to arrange the environment to suit our needs, able to create technology to go to the moon — then why are we destroying our only home? That is so unintelligent of us.

 Do we need to revise our definition of consciousness so that it includes the great apes?

Maybe we should include the great apes. Maybe we should extend certain rights to them that we agree are human rights. I’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect. But we don’t even treat each other with respect. We have all these barriers between cultures and religions and nations, and between us and the natural world.

What are the moral implications of treating other animals with more respect — especially sentient beings like the great apes?

We should not be torturing them in medical research labs in five-foot by five-foot prison cages. We should not be taking them from their mothers and dressing them up for circuses of entertainment. We should not be buying and selling them like slaves for pets. And we shouldn’t be killing them for food or for the live animal trade in the African forests. But we’re doing many of those things to our own species as well. It doesn’t make either of those things better.

When you were at Gombe, did you find yourself wondering what was going on inside the minds of chimpanzees?

Constantly. We can guess what they’re thinking, but how do they think? Are they thinking in pictures? How do you think without words? I spent ages wondering about that.

Were there any particular moments when you felt like you got a better understanding of that?

One moment was very special. That was when I was sitting in the forest with David Greybeard and I picked up a fruit and held it out to him. He turned his head away and I put my hand closer. He turned, looking directly into my eyes, and reached out, took the fruit and dropped it. He didn’t want it. He then very gently squeezed my hand, which is how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment, we communicated with a language — or in a way — that seems to pre-date words, perhaps in a way that was used by our own common ancestor millions of years ago. It was an extraordinary feeling. It was bridging these two worlds.

You seem drawn to the idea of knowing the world without language or words.

I am fascinated by it. I always have been. We think with words. But when we don’t think with words, I think we come close to what mystics might describe as a mystical experience. I don’t think words would come into that.

Did you have mystical experiences at Gombe?

Yeah, sometimes. But it’s awfully hard to describe because words aren’t there. It’s a feeling of complete oneness with the natural world, and being able to hear it better and sense it better and smell it better and be better.

Can you tell me about one of those moments?

One was when I’d been following a little group of chimpanzees and I was wet. In the evening, they climbed up into this tree, which had beautiful lime green shoots. The sun behind them was making them shine and the trunks of the trees were still wet and shining black ebony. And the chimpanzees’ coats were black ebony shot with little gleams of chestnut. The smell of ripe figs was strong in the air. Then this beautiful male bushbuck appeared with his coat dark with the rain, his spiraled horns gleaming, and just stood there. It seemed I could hear the insects loud and clear, much differently than usual. And the birds. And each leaf with its pattern of veins. It was incredibly vivid, being at one with that beautiful world.

It sounds like you lost your sense of your own self.

That’s it. Totally losing sense of one’s own self. That’s the only way I can study animals. Because if I’m on my own, I forget that I’m there. I’m with them. I’m not considering that I’m there. I’m just considering them.

In your book “Reason for Hope,” you speculate that chimpanzees might also have spiritual lives of their own. You’ve written, for instance, about a beautiful waterfall they go to. You suggest that they may even have some experience of awe.

 Well, they sometimes pass there when they go from A to B, but it’s what happens when they’re near that. You can hear the roar of the falling water. It falls about 80 feet. The chimpanzees, usually the males, will bristle a little bit with excitement. And as they get near, they start these rhythmic displays, swaying from foot to foot, often upright. They may climb the vines and push out into the spray. And afterward, they may sit watching the water as it falls, watching as it flows past them. What is it? What is this strange substance which is always coming and always going and always here? You can’t help feeling that if they had a language like ours, they could discuss whatever feeling it was that led them to these dramatic displays, which would turn into some kind of animistic religion. Watching these displays, you can’t help feeling that it must be something that we would describe as awe or wonder or amazement, which can turn into the worship of things that we don’t understand.

It makes you wonder if our own ancestors millions of years ago had similar experiences.

I would bet they did. I think we still do. But we immediately describe them with words.

Has that made you wonder about the origins of religion?

Yes, it probably originated with something like that. Because we have language, because we like to explain everything, we describe experiences in terms of a spiritual or religious experience. Whatever is inside us that makes who we are feel different from our mind, we call a soul or a spirit. And if we have souls or spirits, then I suspect that chimpanzees do too. I’ve always felt that if I had to describe what it is, I would say it’s a little spark of a great spiritual power that I felt so strongly around me when I was out in the forest alone. Probably that little spark is in all living things. And it’s we, with our passion for describing everything, who decided to call it a soul or a spirit.

It’s unusual for a scientist of your stature to be upfront about your own spiritual views. You’ve written about how you were raised in an open-minded Christian family. How has your sense of spirituality evolved over the years?

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind. Then I was in Gombe, spending all that time alone out there with nature, and just feeling a strong sense of something other than me that was out there.

You’ve also written about a transformative experience you once had at Notre Dame in Paris. What happened there?

It was not a peaceful time of my life. I went there early in the morning, just as the sun was coming in the great rose window. And it was Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor from the organ that suddenly filled the cathedral. There was a wedding, though I just heard this music. I can’t accept that the humans who built that amazing cathedral and wrote that music, and the people who’d prayed there for hundreds of years, I couldn’t accept that it was all chance — little bits of matter dancing around that suddenly somehow turned into this amazing experience. Therefore, if it wasn’t chance, then it was anti-chance, which means something like God. But as I’m not a theologian or a philosopher, I don’t have the words to explain what I mean.

 You seem to be convinced that there’s some underlying purpose to our existence and to the universe.

That’s what I strongly feel. And I feel that for some extraordinary and peculiar reason, I have been almost pushed to do what I’ve done. I look back over my life and see the stages that led seamlessly from one to another to another. I suppose I could have said “no” and chosen a different way. But it just seemed inevitable to bring me to what I’m doing now, which is crazy, really.

 What do you say to all those biologists who think it’s just an evolutionary accident that human beings ever evolved?

I don’t get into discussions with them because I don’t care. I just feel this way myself. It helps me to believe there’s a purpose. I don’t want to argue with them. I don’t mind what they believe.

But you’re taking me away from everything I’m trying to do now, which is trying to get people to roll up their sleeves. People often ask me, “OK, do you believe in creation or God?” And I always say quite honestly, how we got to be who we are is so much less important than getting together to get ourselves out of this horrendous mess that we have put the planet in. We’re reaching the point of no return. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves. We’ve got to take action. We can’t afford to sit back and philosophize too long about how we got to be the way we are.

Well, you’ve written, for instance, about a remarkable experience you had, a vision of your husband Derek after he died. Can you describe what happened?

Yes, it was extremely strange. I’d gone back to Gombe because it’s very peaceful to be out in nature with chimpanzees who aren’t questioning you or sympathizing with you. They’re just getting on and being and doing. You get this feeling of the cycles of life and death. But I was woken up at night and there was Derek talking to me, very happy. I couldn’t see him. At least I don’t know if I could, because all I remember is waking and thinking, “I’ve got to write this down. It’s fantastic.” And then this feeling that you get when you’re about to faint, this roaring in the ears. And then, I don’t know if I fell asleep again or what, but I started remembering. And when I started remembering, the roaring came back. So I went to sleep again, and I couldn’t remember anything he’d said. I’d vividly remembered what happened, but I couldn’t remember any words.

I talked to a very strange lady — a medium — who said exactly the same had happened to her when her husband died. She had tried to get out of bed to write it down, and had gone into a coma and nearly died. So I said, “Goodness, don’t get out of bed if it happens again!” And I asked, “What do you think it was?” She said, “I don’t know, but maybe I was trying to move from one plane to another.” You know, I’m not going to go deeply into exactly what happened. I don’t know. All I know is that something happened that gave me this strong feeling that there is something that continues after we die.

And you’re convinced that wasn’t just a dream you had?

No, it wasn’t a dream. And it was strange that she had exactly the same feeling. Of course, we read these books about lights at the end of tunnels, and the “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” I’ve been with so many people who accept this absolutely as a matter of fact.

I’m willing to bet that you get a lot of flak from scientists for talking publicly about this kind of thing. Do you worry about that?

No, I don’t care. I never have. And I think it’s very helpful for a lot of people who do have a religion that they find my books extremely helpful.

Today, you are more an activist than a scientist. You travel constantly, talking about environmental concerns and animal rights issues. What do you see as the biggest impact you can have right now?

I always think there are two. One is going back to my roots. Because I had this opportunity to work with chimpanzees, it has given people a different way of looking at animals and understanding them better. And the other one is working with youth and giving people hope. There’s hope when we realize that every one of us makes an impact on this planet every single day. We have a choice as to what we buy, what we eat, what we drink, what we wear, how we get from A to B, how we interact with people and animals. These small changes in lifestyle can add up to the kind of change that we need.

How have some of these issues played out in your own life — what you eat, what you buy, what you wear?

In the early 70s, I read Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation.” Once I learned what factory farms did to cows and pigs and hens, I was totally horrified. I looked at the piece of meat on my plate and I thought this is symbolic of fear and pain and death. I never ate another piece of meat. I’m not a vegan. I’m a vegetarian. And try to think about buying a cheap garment. Was it cheap because it involved child slave labor? Have products that you just pick up off a shelf caused destruction to the environment? If we would try to think about the consequences of our actions, it would make a big difference.

How are the chimpanzees at Gombe doing now?

Not that well. There were 150 in three communities when I arrived. The main study community is in the middle of a long, thin strip of forest, and it’s about the same as it always was. But to the north and the south, where chimps have come up against cultivated fields, which now completely surround the tiny 30-square mile park, those communities have dwindled. So there are only a total of about 100 chimpanzees at Gombe today.

We’re trying to ensure their future by working with the people living around the park. They are very poor people. They can’t afford to pay for food elsewhere, so they’ve degraded the land. We can’t really hope to save the chimps unless we can improve the lives of these people. So now we’re in 32 villages with our Take Care program. We provide information about farming practices most suitable to this degraded land, information and help for water systems and sanitation, we provide microcredit for groups of women so they can start their own small environmentally sustainable projects, scholarships for girls so they can stay in school — concentrating on women because all around the world, family size drops as women’s education improves.

The final piece in all of this is that up in the high hills a very good coffee is grown. I was able to persuade some coffee roasters — primarily Green Mountain coffee roasters — to come and test the coffee, buy it, help to improve the farming practices for harvesting and storing the coffee, and provide a good price for the first time. As a result, the villagers are setting aside between 10 and 20 percent of their village land for regeneration of forest or protection of the last little patches. We’ve done it by deliberately helping them in the way that they wish, not going in and telling them what a bunch of white people want to do, but with our Tanzanian team listening and asking, what would make your lives better? It didn’t start with conservation at all. It was health and their children’s education. That’s where we began. Now, these people are our partners. They’re fascinated by the chimpanzees. They realize it’s part of their heritage. They realize it’s because of the chimpanzees that we’re there in the first place. They’re grateful and they’re putting land aside for the chimps.

What advice do you have for kids who would like to do what you did — to become a naturalist and study animals?

Don’t just learn virtually. Don’t just learn from your TV screen. Go out and watch. Even if you’re in the middle of an inner city, you can grow things and watch how they grow. You can study pigeons or trees out in the streets. There’s always a way of getting out there and feeling the earth, and learning something about the natural world. It’s so important.

A physician by training, Kaufmann is a widely admired biologist; in 1987, he was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award. He’s also one of the gurus of complexity theory, and for years was a fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, the renowned scientific research community. A few years ago, he moved to the University of Calgary to set up the Biocomplexity and Informatics Institute.

If this sounds heady, it is. And getting Kauffman to explain his theory of self-organization, “thermodynamic work cycles” and “autocatalysis” to a non-scientist is challenging. But Kauffman is at heart a philosopher who ranges over vast fields of inquiry, from the origins of life to the philosophy of mind. He’s a visionary thinker who’s not afraid to play with big ideas.

In his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred,” Kauffman has launched an even more audacious project. He seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

Kauffman is now approaching 70, and his advancing age may partly account for the urgency he seems to feel in grappling with life’s ultimate questions. When I spoke with him, I found him in an expansive mood as we ranged over a host of big ideas, from the prospects of creating life in a test tube to the need for a sacred science.

You’ve suggested we need a new scientific worldview that goes beyond reductionism and incorporates a religious sensibility. Why?

The first thing to say is that the current scientific paradigm has done extraordinarily good work for at least 350 years. The reigning paradigm of reductionism takes a little bit of explaining.

It goes back to the Greeks in the 1st century A.D., and then it explodes at the time of Newton, who had three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation. With Newton comes the idea of a deterministic universe. In fact, he took himself to be doing the work of God. The theistic god who reached into the universe and changed its course gave way during the Enlightenment to a deistic god, who wound up the universe at the beginning and let Newton’s laws take over. It was the clockwork universe.

So the idea is that if you understand the laws of the universe, you can plug in all the variables and predict what the outcomes will be. 

Exactly. It finds its clearest explanation in the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, at the time of Napoleon, who said if you knew the masses and velocities of all the particles in the universe, then you could compute the entire future and past of the universe. As the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg says, once all the science is completed, all the explanatory arrows will point downward from societies to people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics.

And if you can explain the laws of physics, Weinberg thinks you can explain everything else.

Right. He also says we live in a meaningless universe. Those are the fruits of standard reductionism. And the majority of scientists remain reductionists. It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Can you explain what emergence is?

There are things that we just can’t deduce from particle physics — life, agency, meaning, value and this thing called consciousness. The fact is that we can act on our own behalf and make choices. So agency is real. With agency comes value. Dinner is either good or bad. There’s consciousness in the universe. We may not be able to explain it, but it’s true. So the first new strand in the scientific worldview is emergence.

And that new scientific view has no room for reductionism?

Right. In physics, and in the meaningless universe of Steven Weinberg, there are only happenings. Balls roll down hills but they don’t do anything. “Doing” does not exist in physics. Physics cannot talk about values because you have to have agency to have values. So let’s talk about agency for a moment.

You and I are having an interview right now. We’re acting on our own behalf and we’re changing the world as we do so. The physicist Philip Anderson has a charming way of putting it. He says if you doubt agency, just look at the anguished expression on your dog’s face when you say, “Come.” When I used to call my sweet dog, who died recently, he would give me a sidelong glance. I think he was thinking, “Well, I’ve got more time here.” Finally, I’d say, “Come, Windsor!” And he’d come.

I don’t doubt agency in my dog Windsor. And once you’ve got agency — and I think it’s sitting there at the origin of life — then you’ve got food or poison, which I call “yuck” and “yum.” And once you’ve got food or poison, it is either good or bad for that organism. So you’ve got value in the universe.

Are you rejecting Weinberg’s famous comment? “The more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems.”

I profoundly believe that Weinberg is wrong. I also happen to think that Weinberg is utterly brilliant. He’s one of the best defenders of the pure reductionist stance. But once you’ve got agency, you’ve got meaning. This is the beginning of a change in our scientific worldview. Agency is real, so meaning is real in the universe. Value is real, at least in the biosphere. And these things can’t be talked about by physicists.

So the reductionist model breaks down when we’re talking about how life evolves.

Absolutely. This idea is frightening at first, but then utterly liberating. For 3.8 billion years, the biosphere has been expanding from the origin of life into what I call “the adjacent possible.” Once we’re at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It’s doing something that it’s never done before.

To take one example, I argue that the evolutionary emergence of the human heart cannot be deduced from physics. That doesn’t mean it breaks any laws of physics. But there’s no way of getting from physics to the emergence of hearts in the evolution of the biosphere. If you were to ask Darwin, what’s the function of the heart? he would have said it’s to pump blood. That’s what Darwin meant by adaptation. But there may be other causal consequences of the heart, or any other part of you, that are of no functional significance in the current environment, but may become useful in a different environment.

Isn’t this called a Darwinian pre-adaptation?

Yes. And when a pre-adaptation happens, a new function comes to exist in the biosphere and can change the history of the planet. We just don’t know ahead of time what the relevant selective environments are. This is just stunning when you think about it. We cannot say how the biosphere will evolve.

The same is true for our technologies, our economy, our culture. We didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen with the invention of writing or the invention of tractors. These were Darwinian pre-adaptations at the technological level. This is the creativity of the universe that we’re participating in right now. We literally don’t have the faintest idea what the biosphere is going to invent in the next million years, or what technology is going to invent in the next 40 years. Who foresaw the Web 50 years ago?

It seems that one of your big goals is to explain the origin of life. You have devoted much of your career to trying to work out a science of self-organization. Can you explain this?

 It’s harder than you think. I wrote a whole book, “The Origins of Order,” and I very carefully never defined self-organization. My own life work asks if there might be laws of self-organization that are sources of order in biology quite apart from natural selection. For most biologists, the only source of order is natural selection. But we don’t need DNA or RNA to get molecular reproduction. People have already made self-reproducing systems. Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Research Institute took a string of amino acids and used it to replicate itself.

But the second part has to do with self-organization. I worked out a mathematical theory, which says if we have a large enough diversity of molecules and chemical reactions, so many reactions will be catalyzed that you’ll get some form of collective autocatalysis popping out of the soup. The mathematics has been proved, but it still needs to be shown experimentally. For years, I’ve been probing laws of self-organization that co-mingle with natural selection, and give rise to the order we see. And we’re not very far, experimentally, from creating life all on our own.

One of the great mysteries of science is consciousness. Virtually all scientists assume the mind is formed by neural circuits in the brain, while religious traditions typically see a direct connection between the human mind and God. Do you accept either of those views?

 Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is. In the Western tradition, St. Augustine said the human mind is directly connected to the mind of God. The dualism of Descartes distinguished between mental substances and physical substances. Now, contemporary neurobiologists and computer scientists believe that if you have a sufficiently complex computing system — like neurons or logical gates in a computer — then it would become conscious.

But I’ll tell you my own bias. I think it’s possible the mind is associated with quantum mechanics. Now, a good physicist will say, “That’s just nonsense. Quantum behavior will disappear in 10 to the minus 15th second, so it can’t happen.” Well, there are recent theorems in quantum computing that say that’s not necessarily so. The question is, Can you get sustained quantum coherent behavior at body temperature in something like neurons? Nobody knows.

 Are you saying there’s no way that computer scientists in the future will be able to reproduce the human brain? That computers will not be able to create consciousness?

 Roger Penrose wrote a book called “The Emperor’s New Mind.” He looked at this argument for artificial intelligence, and he said it’s just bunk. I think he’s right. I’ve fallen in love with the idea that consciousness has something to do with being poised forever between the quantum world of possibilities, where nothing actual happens, and the transformation of that — whether it’s the collapse of the wave function or decoherence, where something actual happens in the world.

If this is related to consciousness, it provides an intellectual framework in which we can understand the mind acting on matter. Quantum mechanics is astonishing because it’s not causal. It just happens. Maybe the mind is acausal. Maybe the mind is non-algorithmic. I don’t want you to take this very seriously. It’s just Stu Kauffman getting old and thinking weird things. But it may be true. And even if my arguments are right, it still doesn’t tell us what consciousness is. I don’t have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind. 

You call yourself a secular humanist. But you also say we need to reinvent the sacred. What do you mean by that?

Once one gets beyond reductionism, it leads to a radically new scientific worldview, which changes our place in the universe as human beings. We are not meaningless chunks of particles spinning around in space. We are organisms with meaning in our lives, and the way the biosphere will evolve is ceaselessly creative. The way the economy evolves is ceaselessly creative in ways that cannot be predicted ahead of time. That’s why five-year plans don’t work. The same thing for human culture.

OK, we can’t predict what’s going to happen. But I’m still trying to figure out why you invoke religious language. Why do we need a new understanding of God and the sacred?

First of all, because of global communications and commerce, a global civilization of some kind is emerging. But there’s also a natural retreat by some people into religious fundamentalism, and people are killing each other. So I think a shared sacred space across all of our traditions will lead us to coalesce around a sense of what is sacred; for example, all life on the planet and the planet itself. I hope we can find our way to a global ethic, beyond just the love of family, a sense of fairness, and a belief in democracy and free markets. 

Historically, God has had a very specific meaning, particularly in the Western tradition. It refers to an all-powerful, transcendent reality. Can you take such a loaded word and give it a new meaning?

Maybe. I have a very explicit reason for wanting to use the word “God.” It’s the most powerful symbol humanity has created. We have been worshiping God or gods at least since the sacred earth mother 10,000 years ago in Europe. In the Abrahamic tradition, our sense of God has evolved. For example, the Israelites, 4,500 years ago, had Yahweh, who was a ferocious warrior, a law-giving God. That’s a very different god than the one that Jesus spoke of, a God of love. So our sense of God just in the Abrahamic tradition has evolved.

The question is whether we choose to take our most powerful, invented symbol and use it in a new way to mean the creativity in nature itself. Is it more astonishing to believe in a God who created everything that has come to exist — planets, galaxies, chemistry, life and consciousness — in six days? Or is it even more astonishing and awesome to believe what is almost certainly the truth: namely, that all of this came to be all on its own? I think the second.

Most scientists talk about the origins of the world strictly through naturalistic means. Why are you so determined to invoke “God”?

“God” carries with it a sense of awe, reverence and wonder that no other symbol carries. It’s a choice. Can we give up the creator God — the all-powerful, omnipotent, all-loving God who confronts us with the problem of evil — and instead find reverence for a ceaseless creativity in the unfolding of nature? I think we can.

I also feel parts of the religious person’s sense of awe. I sense the solace that prayer to a transcendent God brings. But I don’t believe in a transcendent God. I do believe in this new scientific worldview.

Forget the “God” word for a second and just try to feel yourself as a co-creating member of the universe. It changes your stance from the secular humanist lack of spirituality to a sense of awed wonder that all of this has come about. For example, I was sitting on my patio and started thinking about the trees around me. I thought I’m one with all of life. If I’m going to cut down a tree, I better have a good reason. It’s not just an object. It’s alive. Then I thought about the river I’m sitting next to. I can dam the river if I want to. But I’m going to change the ecosystem downstream from it and change the planet.

So even without talking about God, this new scientific worldview brings with it a sense of membership with all of life and a responsibility for the planet that’s largely missing in our secular world. In a materialist society, being spiritual is — if not frowned upon — what you do in the privacy of your own mind because there’s something flaky about it for those of us who don’t believe in God.

It sounds like your God is equivalent to nature.

I’m saying God is the sacredness of nature. And you can go a step beyond that. You can say that God is nature. That’s the God of Spinoza. That’s the God that Einstein believed in. But their view of the universe was deterministic. The new view is that evolution of the universe is partially lawless and ceaselessly creative. We are the children of that creativity. One either does or does not take the step of saying God is the creativity of the universe. I do. Or you say there is divinity in the creativity in the universe. If we can’t transform our secular humanist, consumerist worldview into one in which we have this sense of responsibility, awe and wonder for the planet and all life, then we can’t invent a global ethic. Yet we need it to create a transnational, mythic structure to sustain the global civilization that’s emerging.

You are Jewish, but you’ve said you can’t accept the God of Abraham. Have there been occasions in your life when you wish you could?

Sure. I don’t believe in God, but I seem to thank Him a lot. It’s not logical but it feels right. Of course, Jews don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. I’m almost 70 and have lived a lot more than half my life. Death is frightening. It would be wonderful to be able to believe in a heaven so that when I die, I could see my daughter who was killed 20 years ago. I wish I could, but I don’t. I think when I die, I die. But it would be nice to believe the other.

 Your daughter Merit’s death must have been a wrenching experience. Did that pull you in a religious direction?

 In one sense. There’s an ancient Aramaic prayer that’s perhaps 5,000 years old. It’s the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. When Merit died, it mattered enormously to me as a non-observant Jew, but a member of the Jewish community, that the Kaddish be said for my daughter.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that Neanderthals buried their dead. They aren’t even in the direct lineage of Homo sapiens. Why did they bury their dead? The need to reach out in these spiritual directions is antique in us. You can see it in the struggle that’s going on right now among religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalist Islam is appalled at the materialism and secularism of the West. Some kind of awakening to the spiritual part of being human seems to me just essential. And this goes beyond where science can go.

You don’t accept traditional beliefs about God. But are you carving out a different space from atheists, especially the scientists who are atheists?

I absolutely am. Take Richard Dawkins‘ book “The God Delusion.” It’s a very good book. And I know Richard, and he lays out the atheist case well. It appeals to the billion or so of us who do not believe in a supernatural God, and who’ve hidden in the corners, particularly in the United States, where religion is so widely adhered to. But it will do no good whatsoever in bridging the gap between those who do believe in some form of God and the secular humanists like Dawkins and myself who do not. We need something else.

Well, Dawkins does not want to bridge that gap. He wants to convince those religious believers that they’re wrong.

Absolutely. But I think Richard is wrong. Not that there’s a supernatural god. I think that there’s something else. I think the creativity in nature is so stunning and so overwhelming that it’s God enough for me, and I think it’s God enough for many of us if we think about it. You see, Richard’s view, and those of the new atheists, is simply not going to reach out and persuade those who hold to the standard Abrahamic religious views to consider something else. Whereas I hope what I’m saying may help create a new kind of sacred space.

To Carse, religion is all about longevity; it’s what unites people over the millennia. He cautions his readers against looking for more conventional explanations, like the search for transcendence or belief in an afterlife. He writes that religion’s vitality is based on mystery and unknowability: “Religion in its purest form is a vast work of poetry.”

Carse dismisses attempts to find some underlying unity to all religions. He says the major religions differ radically from each other. He also shrugs off 2,000 years of Christian debate over who the real Jesus was, claiming “it says nothing.” He even speculates that this religious tradition, with its 2 billion followers, may be unraveling. “Christianity is losing its resonance,” he writes. “Its history looks to be more a matter of decades than millennia.”

Is Carse the man to save religion from its enemies and false prophets? I found him to be charming and good-humored in conversation, even as he lobbed grenades into our conventional ideas about religion.

I think the vast majority of people would say belief is at the very core of religion. How can you say religion does not involve belief?

It’s an odd thing. Scholars of religion are perfectly aware that belief and religion don’t perfectly overlap. It’s not that they’re completely indifferent to each other, but you can be religious without being a believer. And you can be a believer who’s not religious. Let’s say you want to know what it means to be Jewish. So you draw up a list of beliefs that you think Jews hold. You go down that list and say, “I think I believe all of these.” But does that make you a Jew? Obviously not. Being Jewish is far more and far richer than agreeing to a certain list of beliefs. Now, it is the case that Christians in particular are interested in proper belief and what they call orthodoxy. However, there’s a very uneven track of orthodoxy when you look at the history of Christianity. It’s not at all clear what exactly one should believe.

So there’s a lot of argument over which are the proper beliefs.

That’s right. After the New Testament period, there was a lot of quarreling over exactly how to formulate what Jesus taught, who he was, and how to lead the Christian life. So early Christians began forming creeds. By the year 325 there was so much division among Christians about how to understand Jesus — his work and his person — that it was actually breaking up the Roman Empire and forcing the emperor Constantine, who was a very recent Christian convert, to call a conference in the small city of Nicea. In effect, he ordered all the bishops and leaders of the church to settle these issues once and for all. The result, the Nicene Creed, is basically a negative document. Each phrase in the creed is intended to correct or argue against some other belief. So it’s a creed and a counter-creed at the same time.

It sounds like you’re saying that belief doesn’t need to have any religious associations. You could just as well be talking about Nazism or Maoism or Serbian nationalism.

Exactly. In fact, very passionate believers are often not at all religious. However, it does happen to be the case that people who hold on to beliefs with great passion begin to describe themselves as religious. For example, the Nazis had a kind of pseudo-religious understanding of themselves. Hitler talked about a 10,000-year Reich. That’s taken right out of Christian mythology — the kingdom of God going on forever and ever. The swastika is, after all, in the form of the cross. So Hitler was a passionate believer — not religious but pseudo-religious — ascribing to himself some sort of religious aura.

So what is it that holds together a belief system?

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it’s very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

What, then, do you mean by religion?

Religion is notoriously difficult to define. Modern scholars have almost unanimously decided that there is no generalization that applies to all the great living religions. Jews don’t have a priesthood. Catholics do. The prayer in one tradition is different from another. The literature and the texts are radically different from each other. So it leaves us with the question: Is there any generalization one could make about religion?

But aren’t there certain core questions that religion grapples with: God or some kind of transcendent reality? Evil and the afterlife?

Well, let’s talk about the five great religions: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Hinduism is 4,000 years old. Judaism is hard to date but about 3,000 years old; Buddhism 2,600; Christianity 2,000. And Islam has been with us for 14 centuries. The striking thing is that each of them has been able, over all these centuries, to maintain their identity against all kinds of challenges. Let’s say you’re a Muslim and you want to know what Islam is about. So you begin your inquiries and you find that as you get deeper and deeper in your studies, the questions get larger and larger. If people come to religion authentically, they find their questions not answered but expanded.

In your book, you say the only defining characteristic of religion is its longevity. It has to be around for a very long time to qualify as a religion.

Exactly. That’s a very interesting contrast with belief systems. Belief systems have virtually no longevity. Think of Marxism. As a serious political policy, it lasted only about 70 or 80 years. Nazism only went 12 years. And they were intense, complete, comprehensive, passionately held beliefs. But they ran out very quickly. The reason the great religions don’t run out as quickly is that they’re able to maintain within themselves a deeper sense of the mystery, of the unknowable, of the unsayable, that keeps the religion alive and guarantees its vitality.

But you’ve just used words that people associate with religion, like “mystery” and “the unknowable.” I would add “transcendent.” Don’t you have to talk about these things if you’re going to explain religion?

Take the term “transcendent.” It’s very difficult to find anything in Buddhism that resembles what Christians or Western people think of transcendence. The Buddha was not a divinity. He made it clear that he really died. He wouldn’t dwell with his students forever, but turned over to them the discipline that he tried to teach them. So in Buddhism, there’s really no sense of the divine or the supernatural. And the notion of transcendence in Judaism is not so large. To be a Jew is really to be an active, practicing Jew. It’s a way of living a certain kind of life, not believing something. In my judgment, you can be a very good Jew and have very little sense of transcendence.

Can you be a good Jew and not believe in God?

That’s a good question. A lot of my Jewish friends would say yes. Several of my Jewish colleagues at New York University were absolutely obsessed with what makes a Jew. It turns out the question is very complicated. It goes back into the Talmud. Is it ethnic or is it religious? Does it apply to one practice but not another? So it’s a very difficult question to answer. As a matter of fact, you could even say that Judaism itself exists as an attempt to find out what it means to be a Jew.

You’re also suggesting that there’s no underlying unity that permeates all religions, that, in fact, they’re totally different from each other.

I’m absolutely saying that. There have been a lot of fantasies about putting all the religions together. Mahatma Gandhi was famous for saying that all religions are, at their core, the same. But I have spent my life studying these traditions. I am a historian of religion. And the more I studied them, the more I saw that they were absolutely different.

But if the only test of a religion is its staying power, are you saying Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, is not a religion? Or Pentecostalism, which some religious scholars say is the most important religious movement of the last century?

Those are large questions. Will Mormonism hold out over the centuries? It’s a difficult judgment. I don’t have an answer for that. What I’d really like to focus on is how extremely long the great traditions are. There are other traditions that aren’t that long: Sikhism, various kinds of Middle Eastern religions, mystical movements. Mormonism is an open question. You could even talk about Scientology. Does it really have staying power over the centuries? I would doubt it, but we don’t know yet.

Are you religious yourself?

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There’s no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

What about God? If God is defined as some sort of transcendent reality, do you think God exists?

[Laughs] Frankly, no. But there are so many different conceptions of God. Take, for example, the medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics. It’s a very rich period from the 12th to the 15th centuries. They began to realize that in each of their traditions, it was impossible to say exactly who God was and what he wants and what he’s doing. In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can’t answer. That’s as far as I can go. But it’s got its grip on me, for sure.

Do you engage in any kind of regular religious practice?

I have, off and on, over the years. I find certain religious liturgies very compelling, especially the Christian Eucharist, which is the celebration of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. When you begin to look into the aspects of that liturgy, there are some very strange things. For example, breaking and eating the body of God and drinking the blood of Jesus. What in heaven’s name is that about? Once you begin to inquire into it, what you find are very deep echoes with ancient religious traditions. Primitive people sacrificed their gods and literally drank their blood. They would elect someone to be a god for a year or a season and would then sacrifice that person. You also have to understand the art, the music and the rich culture that surrounds these traditions. Think of Chartres, the Vatican, the Dome of the Rock, the great temple in Jerusalem, which in its day was the largest building in the world. And the music, the poetry, the great scriptural texts; it’s a very rich fabric. I find myself deeply moved and endlessly reflective about it.

Given what’s happening in the world right now, do you think there’s a lot at stake in how we talk about religion and belief?

Absolutely. In the current, very popular attack on religion, the one thing that’s left out is the sense of religion that I’ve been talking about. Instead, it’s an attack on what’s essentially a belief system.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion. Therefore, it’s too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is. That kind of critique also tends to set up a counter-belief system of its own. Daniel Dennett proposes his own, fairly comprehensive belief system based on evolution and psychology. From his point of view, it seems that everything can be explained. Harris and Dawkins are not quite that extreme. But that’s a danger with all of them. To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you’re not believing in. Therefore, if you don’t have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

And yet, you’ve just told me that you yourself don’t believe in a divine reality. In some ways, your critique of belief systems seems to go along with what the new atheists are saying.

The difference, though, is that I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe. That’s a mode of being that has nothing to do with belief. So I have very little in common with them. As a matter of fact, one reason I wrote the book is that a much more compelling critique of belief systems comes not from the scientific side but from the religious side. When you look at belief systems from a religious perspective, what’s exposed is how limited they are, how deeply authoritarian they are, how rationalistic and comprehensive they claim to be, but at the same time how little staying power they have with the human imagination. It’s a deeper and much more incisive critique.

It’s interesting that you’re going after the atheists. I would have guessed that you wrote this book to criticize true believers who are religious fundamentalists.

Oh yes, I’m very concerned with belief systems. Today, the world is really being ravaged by conflicts between believers. Go to Bosnia, anywhere in the Middle East, to China, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Kosovo, Chechnya, even in Europe. There are great crises in France and Britain, even Holland and Denmark. So it’s very important to understand how different belief systems work and what’s inherently wrong with them.

But I have to wonder if your dichotomy between religion and belief is simply your attempt to rescue religion from what you consider to be ill-formed or dangerous believers. Is this just your way of separating good religion from bad religion?

Well, you could see it that way. But my deeper point is that religion doesn’t need to be defended. I’m not going to make a whit of difference to a tradition that’s 2,000 years old and has 2 billion people talking about it. That’s a remarkable phenomenon. I don’t have a case to make for religion. In fact, as a historian of religion, I’m very aware of the fact that religions die. They disappear. Hundreds of them have over the centuries. I even believe that Christianity and Islam and the other great traditions will themselves dissipate in one way or another.

You say we’re actually beginning to see the death throes of Christianity. That’s a startling comment, considering how many people around the world identify themselves as Christians.

I think there’s a fragmentation going on that’s quite significant, a tendency to identify with something outside their religious tradition. Once they’ve married their Christian faith to a national or ethnic identity, then it loses its deep historical Christian character. To look at these huge mega-churches, for example, the startling thing to me is when you go to their services, you don’t have any sense of the enormous complexity of the history. You have the feeling that Jesus walked in here yesterday, and the minister will pick up a few contemporary cultural phenomena, like popular music. You’re seated in something like an auditorium. There’s no cathedral atmosphere. There’s no great chanting choir. I think it’s lost that indefinability.

You refer to the period we’re now living in as the Second Age of Faith. What do you mean?

The so-called Age of Faith runs from the end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 13th. It’s a period in Europe in which all the religions grew very rapidly. It was also a period of terrible conflict. At the end of the 11th century, Pope Urban II gave one of the most consequential speeches in Christian history. He called on Christians to rise up and take Jerusalem back from the Saracens. And it was with that speech that the Crusades began. The Crusades were an ugly period. It was bloody and cruel. It exhausted people on both sides. No one won or lost. And it went on for centuries.

And you think we’re now in another period like that?

I would say we are back in that crusading spirit. In the modern era, the great belief systems begin to think of themselves in more militaristic ways. And they conceive of themselves more and more in oppositional terms. Look, nothing equals the 20th century for its bloodiness. Who knows how many people were killed? Two hundred million? And the 21st century is not getting that great a start. At the same time, there’s a very rapid growth of belief. Islam is growing faster than ever. Christian evangelicalism is probably one of the most rapidly growing phenomena in religious history. Mormonism is just racing along. The earth as a whole is getting more and more religious. But it has nonetheless become more and more preoccupied with conflict.

You have a provocative view of Jesus. You claim that “the vast literature on Jesus is not about anything; that, in fact, it says nothing.” That’s hard to swallow, given that we’ve had 2,000 years of inquiry and debate about who the real Jesus was.

The most difficult part of understanding Christianity is trying to get at who Jesus was. The New Testament writers were very confused about who Jesus was and what he was doing. And during the New Testament era, there was great strife among Christians. They were quarreling with each other over a number of questions. Was Jesus really God? Or was he only appearing to be God? Was he simply a person of such perfect morality that God adopted him? Was he created by God after the creation? Where does he belong in the Trinity, Augustine asked in the early 5th century?

Later on, St. Thomas, the great theologian of the Catholic tradition, understood the church as the historical extension of the incarnation. This is a very radical idea. So you know Jesus not through Scripture and not through some kind of internal experience, but through the existence of the church itself. And then you get Martin Luther, who rejected that idea and said the only way you really get to know Jesus is through Scripture. It couldn’t be more different than Thomas’ conception. Then you get Calvin, a contemporary of Luther’s, who understood Jesus strictly in Old Testament terms, as prophet, priest and king. And then you have Soren Kierkegaard, under the influence of Hegel, who saw Jesus as “the absolute paradox,” the eternal and the human combined in one historical moment, which is in fact unintelligible. I call this long history of how Jesus has been understood and interpreted “an abundance of Jesuses.”

And we’re not even up to the 20th century. You could say this convoluted history is a mess. After all, what are Christians supposed to believe? Or you could say all this passion over competing interpretations reveals the vitality of this religion.

What’s striking to me is not that Christians keep disagreeing about these things. They can’t stop arguing with each other. The issue doesn’t go away. You’d think, we can’t settle exactly who Jesus is, so let’s forget it. But the subject burns. It holds people’s attention and requires some kind of response. I think Christianity is the attempt to answer that very question. And that’s why I made what may seem to be an outrageous remark: When you look at the way Jesus has been interpreted over the centuries, it says nothing. What do we actually know about Jesus? Well, there’s only one historical contemporary reference to Jesus. That’s in the historian Josephus. All he said was that Jesus lived, he was loved by his disciples, and was executed for a crime that Josephus doesn’t indicate.

Even the Gospels are not contemporary accounts. They were written after the life of Jesus.

They were written many years later. The earliest is the Gospel of Mark, probably written 35 years after the death of Jesus. The Gospel of John is written anywhere from 60 to 65 years later. They were written by Greeks, not by Jews. These were people who couldn’t speak Hebrew. They probably had never even been in Jerusalem, and they certainly did not know Jesus personally. They probably knew no one who knew Jesus personally. So if we have to get down to solid fact, what we have is an illiterate young man, a homeless man, who wandered about the area of Galilee — a backwater in the Roman Empire — who taught some things, healed some people, and was executed by the Romans. That’s about it in terms of historical verification. That’s not much.

Isn’t this a point of great contention? Some biblical scholars say Paul’s letters were written just 15 to 25 years after the death of Jesus. In Corinthians, Paul refers to hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. And the author of the Gospel of Luke claims that he got his account of Jesus’ life from eyewitnesses who were still alive. Christian scholars point to these accounts as evidence that the story of Jesus is grounded in history, not just myth created long after he died.

It is true that Luke says he’s basing his Gospel on the many stories being told. Even more interesting, John closes his Gospel with the remark that if all the stories being told about Jesus were written down, the world could not contain them all. John also gives us a very different Jesus from the other Gospels. Some of Paul’s letters are the oldest in the New Testament, written before the Gospels, and Paul does refer to Jesus appearing to 500 witnesses. But Paul has nothing to say about the life of Jesus, not a trace of his teachings or his healings. If we had to rely on Paul for a portrait of Jesus, we would know nothing more than Paul’s personal reaction to a mysterious event.

In your book, you say the core of religion is the pursuit of knowledge. But what you really celebrate is what you call “higher ignorance.”

Higher ignorance is one of the great philosophical concepts. Nicholas of Cusa developed this idea. It comes out of the great mystical period of the 15th century. It’s the notion that we can never get outside what we know to say something about it that’s definitive. We’re always locked inside that body of knowledge. For example, we have any number of theories about the origin and nature of the universe, but there is no way we can place ourselves outside the universe and observe it objectively. However learned these theories are, they contain a profound ignorance that cannot be eliminated. Heidegger’s metaphor is that of the “house of language”; we can know nothing except by way of language. There is no outside.

You also say poets are the real visionaries of the world. And you make the case that religion, at its root, is inspired by its poets.

You know, my entire career was at New York University, but I only taught the history of Christianity once. That’s when one of my colleagues was not available. So I went back to my graduate study of St. Thomas Aquinas. And I loved it so much. When we got to Thomas in the class, I began to notice that the students — most of them were Catholics — had stopped taking notes. They stopped moving. It looked like they stopped breathing. They’d never realized that there was so much beauty behind the Catholic teaching. They thought it was about doing something right or wrong, rather than this great cathedral of language within which they could understand their very individual experiences. It struck me that what was great about Thomas is not that he was right or wrong, but that he’s a poet. It’s just beautiful work. It’s an artistic creation of the greatest achievement. And when you take that insight and look across the traditions, you find people of very great poetic insight. The great religious figures are not philosophers, they’re not historians, they’re not institutional leaders in any sense. They are people who inspire the imagination and therefore deserve the word “poet.”

So do we have those poets today — poets in the religious sense?

That’s a very good question. I have a dark view of what’s happening. I think our poets have lost their great voices. If you ask me to point to a poet, I couldn’t do it. We need them. I don’t know where they are. And, of course, there’s no way of getting them. They come on their own. They simply appear. There’s no way you can train someone to be a poet or a great original mind.

Why are you so pessimistic?

Let’s look at Islam, as an example. There’s no way of reducing Islam to a single belief system, but what you have in Islam is a very active series of belief systems. And they’re in deep conflict with each other. There’s no poetry in this. It’s all strictly hard belief, in an oppositional voice. But if you go back in Islamic history, what you get is a very deep sense of poetry. As a matter of fact, the Quran itself is considered so poetically beautiful that it’s a very high value in Islamic life to memorize it and sing it. Muslims refer to the Quran as a recitation, something to be repeated over and over again.

You go back to the medieval mystical period and you find Islamic thinkers who say terribly beautiful things. There’s a story told about Abu Ali of Sind, a famous mystic. He made his annual trip across the desert, which took days, to get his supplies in the markets on the other end of the desert. Then he walked all the way back, opened the packages that he bought and found that there were ants in his cardamom seeds. Immediately, he wrapped the ants back up in the cardamom seeds, walked back across the desert and returned the ants to their home. That’s a different Islam. That’s a poetic Islam. It comes right out of the heart of that religion.

A remarkable autodidact, Wilber’s books range across entire fields of knowledge, from quantum physics to developmental psychology to the history of religion. He’s steeped in the world’s esoteric traditions, such as Mahayana Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, Sufism and Christian mysticism. Wilber also practices what he preaches, sometimes meditating for hours at a stretch. His “integral philosophy,” along with the Integral Institute he’s founded, hold out the promise that we can understand mystical experience without lapsing into New Age mush.

Though he’s often described as a New Age thinker, Wilber ridicules the notion that our minds can shape physical reality, and he’s dismissive of New Age books and films like “The Tao of Physics” and “What the Bleep Do We Know.” But he’s also out to show that “trans-rational” states of consciousness are real, and he’s dubbed the scientific materialists who doubt it “flatlanders.”

Wilber’s hierarchy of spiritual development — and the not-so-subtle suggestion that he himself has reached advanced stages of enlightenment — has also sparked a backlash. Some critics consider him an arrogant know-it-all, too smart for his own good. His dense style of writing, which is often laced with charts and diagrams, can come across as bloodless and hyperrational.

When I reached Wilber by phone at his home in Denver, I found him to be chatty and amiable, even laughing when he described his own recent brush with death. He’s a fast talker who leaps from one big idea to the next. And they are big ideas — God and “Big Self” and why science can only tell us so much about what’s real.

You’ve written that there’s a philosophical cold war between science and religion. Do you see them as fundamentally in conflict?

Personally, I don’t. But it depends on what you mean by science and what you mean by religion. There are at least two main types of religion. One is dependent upon a belief in a mythic or magic dogma. That is certainly what most people mean by religion. Science has pretty thoroughly dismantled the mythic religions. But virtually all the great religions themselves recognize the difference between “exoteric” or outer religion, and “esoteric” or inner religion. Inner religion tends to be more contemplative and mystical and experiential, and less cognitive and conceptual. Science is actually sympathetic with the contemplative traditions in terms of its methodology.

When you refer to mythic religions, are you talking about the kinds of stories we read in the Bible?

Or any of the world’s great religions. Laotzu was 900 years old when he was born. According to the Hindus, the earth is resting on a serpent, which is resting on an elephant, which is resting on a turtle. Those kinds of mythic approaches aren’t wrong. They’re just a stage of development. Look at [Swiss philosopher] Jean Gebser‘s structural stages of development. They go from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and higher. Magic and mythic are actual stages. They’re not wrong any more than saying “5 years old” is wrong. It’s just 5 years old. We expect there to be higher stages. There was a time when the magic and mythic approaches years ago were evolution’s leading edge of development. So we can’t belittle them.

Where do you think the scientific worldview falls short when dealing with religion?

Conventional science has correctly dismantled the pre-rational myths but it goes too far in dismantling the trans-rational. The mythic and magic approaches tend to be pre-rational and pre-verbal, but the meditative or contemplative practices tend to be trans-rational. They completely accept rationality and science. But they point out that there are deeper modes of awareness, which are scientific in their own way.

What do you mean by trans-rational?

People at these higher stages of spiritual development report a “nondual awareness,” a type of awareness that transcends the dichotomy between subject and object. The mystical state is often beyond words. It is trans-rational because you have access to rationality but it’s temporarily suspended. A 6-month-old infant, for instance, is in a pre-rational state, whereas the mystic is in a trans-rational state. Unfortunately, “pre” and “trans” get confused. So some theorists say the infant is in a mystical state.

Are you saying people with a rationalist orientation can’t make these distinctions?

I’m saying that when people look at mystical states, they often confuse them with pre-rational states. People like Sigmund Freud take trans-rational, oceanic states of oneness and reduce them to infantile states of unity.

Why has the scientific worldview dismissed this trans-personal dimension? For most intellectuals around the world, the secular scientific paradigm has triumphed.

It’s understandable. Historically, if you look at these broad stages, the magical era tended to be 50,000 years ago, the mythic era emerged around 5,000 B.C., and the rational era — secular humanism — emerged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

You can’t prove a higher stage to someone who’s not at it. If you go to somebody at the mythic stage and try to prove to them something from the rational, scientific stage, it won’t work. You go to a fundamentalist who doesn’t believe in evolution, who believes the earth was created in six days, and you say, “What about the fossil record”? “Oh yes, the fossil record; God created that on the fifth day.” You can’t use any of the evidence from a higher stage and prove it to a lower stage. So someone who’s at the rational stage has a very hard time seeing these trans-rational, trans-personal stages. The rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense — fairies and ghosts and goblins — and lumps it together with the trans-rational stuff and says, “That’s nonrational. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God?

God is a perfect example of how these two types of religion treat ultimate reality. You asked, “Do you believe in God?” In exoteric religion, it’s a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven? But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most contemplatives would call it “godhead.” It’s so different from the mythic conceptions of God — the old man in the sky with a gray beard. The word “God” is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there’s a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric traditions — super-consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of enlightenment or liberation. It’s what the Sufis call the “supreme identity,” the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground of being in a direct experiential state.

It does raise the question of whether God — or ultimate reality — has some independent existence, or whether this is just a mental state that our minds can conjure up.

That’s right. One way we try to find out is by doing cross-cultural studies of individuals who’ve had the experience of the supreme identity and see if it shows similar characteristics. The most similar characteristic is it doesn’t have characteristics. It’s radically undefinable, radically free, radically empty. This formless ground of being is found in virtually all esoteric religions around the world. For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it’s real. They think this experience discloses a reality that’s independent of the human organism.

Do you see this ultimate reality as some sort of being or intelligence out there?

Well, if you look cross-culturally, what you’ll find is that spirit or godhead can be looked at either through first-person, second-person or third-person perspectives. The third-person perspective is to see spirit as a grand “it.” In other words, a vast web of life. Gaia in this third person is the sum total of everything that exists. A second-person way of looking sees spirit as a “thou,” as an actual intelligence that is present and is something you can, in a sense, have a conversation with, keeping in mind the ultimately unknowable nature of godhead. Many of the contemplative traditions go further and say you can approach spirit as a first person. So that spirit is “I.” Or that would be Big Self.

This means “I am God.”

That’s right. This first-person perspective is an experience of pure “I-am-ness,” behind your relative ego. Discovering your Big Self comes directly in the contemplative state of non-dual awareness. This means subject and object are one. It’s not that you’re looking at the mountain when you’re going on a nature walk. You are the mountain. You’re not listening to the river anymore. You are the river.

You are a longtime meditator. You’ve written about having sustained experiences of this nondual awareness. What does it feel like?

[Laughs] It’s very simple. It’s something that’s already present in one’s awareness but it’s so simple and so obvious that it’s not noticed. Zen refers to it as the “such-ness” of reality. [The Christian mystic] Meister Eckhart called it “thus-ness.” These states of consciousness are temporary, peak experiences. There’s no bliss. Rather, it’s an absence of any constriction, including feelings of bliss. The feeling is vast openness and freedom and lightness. You don’t have a sense that I’m in here and the world is out there.

You were a budding scientist at one point, a graduate student in biochemistry. Why did you give up the scientific track to study these spiritual matters?

I had a scientific orientation. I think I was a born scientist. In fact, I was one of those kids with the early science labs — all the frogs you cut up, the explosions in the basement. I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska. But as I moved into young adulthood, mere rationality didn’t really seem to be answering the questions that were arising in that stage of my life: Why am I here? What’s it all about? What’s the nature of reality?

What changed for you?

I realized that exterior science wasn’t working. So I turned to Zen Buddhism. To me it was very scientific. It’s a practice, an actual experiment. If you do this experiment, you’ll have some sort of experience, and you’ll get some data. William James defined data as an experience. Then you check your direct experience with other people to make sure you didn’t goof up. Some sort of consensual evidence is required. There are several schools of thinking about how to evaluate scientific evidence. One of the most famous is Karl Popper’s, where you try to disprove it. So this process is exactly what I was doing in Zen Buddhism. You have to train your mind. And frankly, this mind training was more difficult than anything I did in graduate school.

What about Karl Popper’s objection: If you can’t disprove something, then it’s not science. Can you disprove the effects of meditation? How far can you take this scientific analogy when you’re talking about a contemplative practice?

Pretty far, I think. These meditative disciplines have been passed down for hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Much like judo, there are actual techniques that you can learn and pass on. In Zen, you have the practice of zazen. You have to sit and count your breath for up to an hour and concentrate on an object for at least five minutes without losing track. The average American adult can do it for 18 seconds. Then you have the data, what’s called satori. Once you train your mind and look into your interior, you investigate the actual nature and structure of your interior consciousness. If you do this intensely enough, you’ll get a profound aha experience, a profound awakening. And that satori is then checked with others who’ve done this practice.

But I doubt many scientists would accept this as proof of science because, ultimately, people are left to describe their own experiences. You can’t measure this with any conventional scientific instruments.

You move in the realm of phenomenology. And you either accept phenomenology or you don’t. This also applies to psychoanalysis. You get the same complaints that it’s not real science, that you can’t prove it. Well, fine, but then you can’t prove any interior experience you’re having. You can’t prove you’re loving your wife, you can’t prove you’re happy. Forget all of that, it’s not real. If that’s the mind-set you have, nobody’s going to convince you otherwise. It really comes down to whether there are interior sciences. These interior sciences use the same principles as the exterior sciences. If you define science as based on sensory experience, then these interior endeavors are not science. But if you define science as based on experience, then these interior ones are.

What about brain-imaging studies? Various neuroscientists are hooking up Buddhist monks and Christian nuns to brain-scanning technology, and they see changes in brain activity during meditation or prayer. But can they tell us anything fundamental about the nature of consciousness?

Yes and no. What’s starting to show up are significant and unique fingerprints of these meditative states on the brain. That’s been demonstrated with people who do a type of meditation that’s said to increase compassion — imagining someone else who’s in pain and breathing in their pain, creating a feeling of oneness with that person. These people start showing distinctive gamma wave patterns. These gamma waves show up almost no place else. But let me tell you what it doesn’t prove. The claim that it’s a higher mental state can only be made if you’re looking at it from the inside. We say that waking is more real than dreaming. But brain waves won’t tell you that. The brain waves are just different. You can’t say one is more real than the other.

This raises a fundamental question about the whole mind-brain problem. Virtually all neuroscientists say the mind is nothing more than a 3-pound mass of firing neurons and electrochemical surges in the brain. Why do you think this view is wrong?

It reduces everything. And you can make no distinctions of value. There’s no such thing as love is better than hate, or a moral impulse is better than an immoral impulse. All those value distinctions are erased.

But is that scientific view wrong?

At this point, you enter the philosophy of science, and the argument is endless. Is there nothing but physical stuff in the universe? Or is there some sort of interiority? We’re not talking about ghosts and goblins and souls and all that kind of stuff. Just: Is there interiority? Is there an inside to the universe? And if there is interiority, then that is where consciousness resides. You can’t see it, but it’s real. This is the claim that phenomenology makes.

For example, you and I are attempting to reach mutual understanding right now. And we say, aha, I understand what you’re saying. But you can’t point to that understanding. Where does it exist? But if you take a phenomenology of our interior states, then you look at them as being real in themselves. And that’s where values lie and meaning lies. If you try to reduce those to matter, you not only lose all those distinctions, but you can’t even make the claim that some are right and some are wrong.

But somewhere down the road — 50 years from now, 500 years from now — once neuroscience becomes much more advanced, will scientists be able to pinpoint where these values and thoughts come from?

I’m saying we’ll never understand it. The materialists keep issuing promissory notes. They always promise they’re going to do it tomorrow. But interior and exterior arise together. You can’t reduce one to the other. They’re both real. Deal with it.

You’re saying there’s no way we can map what’s happening in our brains — the neuronal activity, the synaptic connections — to explain what’s going on in our inner experience.

That’s right. All you can do is map certain correlations. You can say that when a person’s thinking logically, certain parts of the brain light up. But you can’t determine what the person is thinking. More important, you can’t reproduce the reality of the person thinking because that’s a first-person experience. This first-person reality can’t be reduced to third-person material entities. What that means is that consciousness can’t be reduced to matter. You can’t give a material explanation of how the experience of consciousness arises.

Let’s talk about evolution. It seems to me that the great religious traditions don’t know what to do with the evolution of the human brain. At some point in our evolutionary history — maybe 50,000 or 100,000 years ago — the brain developed a new level of complexity that produced language and conceptual thought, basically, the human beings we are today. Is our consciousness rooted in the material matter in our brains?

An integral approach maintains that an increase in the complexity of matter is accompanied by an increase in the degree of consciousness. The greater the one, the greater the other. So if we look at complexity in evolution, it goes from atoms to molecules to cells to early organisms to organisms with a reptilian brain stem to organisms with a mammalian limbic system to organisms with a triune brain. We find major leaps in consciousness with each of those levels of complexity.

But can you even talk about consciousness before you reach a certain level of evolution? I mean, bacteria don’t have consciousness. Plants don’t have consciousness.

I don’t talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority. What you see is that as soon as you have a cell, it starts to respond to the environment in ways that can’t be predicted. If you’re just looking at material stuff — like a planet that doesn’t have life on it — a physicist can tell you where that planet is going to be, barring other forces, 1,000 years from now. But that physicist can’t tell you where my dog is going to be two seconds from now. There is a degree of non-determined interiority. It’s simply there. You can’t dismiss it.

What do you think of the New Age writers who see a link between mysticism and the weirdness of quantum physics? There have been popular books, like “The Tao of Physics” and “The Dancing Wu Li Masters,” as well as the hit film “What the Bleep Do We Know.” They point out that reality at the quantum level is inherently probabilistic. And they say that the act of observing a quantum phenomenon plays a critical role in actually creating that phenomenon. The lesson they draw is that consciousness itself can shape physical reality.

They are confused. Even people like Deepak Chopra say this. These are good people; I know them. But when they say consciousness can act to create matter, whose consciousness? Yours or mine? They never get to that. It’s a very narcissistic view.

But the real problem is what’s called “the measurement problem.” And 95 percent of scientists do not think the measurement problem involves consciousness. It simply involves the fact that you can’t tell where an electron is until you measure it. It’s very different from saying it doesn’t exist until you measure it. That’s entirely different from saying human consciousness causes matter to come into existence. We have abundant evidence that the entire material universe existed before human beings evolved. So the whole notion that human consciousness is required — it retroactively creates the universe — is a much harder myth to believe than myths about God being a white-haired gentleman pulling strings up in the sky.

But you seem to have a dualistic view of how to look at reality. There’s the material stuff and then there’s this interior stuff, and the two have nothing to do with each other.

Well, that’s simply a metaphorical way that I talk about it. Spirit is not some other item sitting over here, separate from the material world. It’s the actual reality of each and every thing that’s arising. The ocean and its waves are typically used as an example to describe this. The ocean is not something different from the waves. It’s the wetness of all waves. So it’s not a dualistic stance at all.

You’ve written that many of the great 20th century physicists — Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg — were actually mystics, even though none of them thought science had any connection to religion.

I wouldn’t say it quite that strongly. What happened is they investigated the physical realm so intensely in looking for answers, and when they didn’t find these answers, they became metaphysical. I collected the writings of the 13 major founders of quantum mechanics. They were saying physics has been used since time immemorial to both prove and disprove God. Both views are fundamentally misguided. These physicists became deep mystics not because of physics, but because of the limitations of physics.

So understanding that physics can only go so far — that there are many things it can’t explain — is ultimately a mystical position?

That’s correct. These are brilliant writings. They’re really quite extraordinary. Not many people realize that Erwin Schrödinger, the founder of quantum mechanics, had a deep satori experience. He found that the position that most matched his own was Vedantic Hinduism — that pure awareness is aware of all objects but cannot itself become an object. It’s the way into the door of realizing ultimate reality. Werner Heisenberg had similar experiences. And Sir Arthur Eddington was probably the most eloquent of the lot. All of them basically said that science neither proves nor disproves emptiness.

You’ve said Buddhism is probably the esoteric tradition that’s influenced you the most. But you also criticize what you call “Boomeritis Buddhism.” What’s that?

What we found in the ’60s was that there was an overinfluence of feelings. Anti-intellectualism was rampant, and it continues to be rampant in a lot of meditative and alternative spiritualities. There’s a tendency to explain the trans-rational states in terms that are pre-verbal. So instead of a Big Self, you’re just experiencing a big ego. For heaven’s sake, this generation was known as the “me generation.”

So the irony is that Buddhism is supposed to be a practice where you get rid of your self, but it sometimes becomes all about yourself.

Exactly. If you’re caught in Boomeritis, you pay attention only to sensory experience. Mental experience is thrown out the door, and so is spiritual experience. It ends up being, inadvertently, all about yourself and your own feelings.

There’s an assumption that master contemplatives, people who can reach exalted states of enlightenment, are wonderful human beings, that goodness radiates from them. Do you think that’s true?

Nothing’s ever quite that simple. There are different kinds of intelligence, and they develop at different rates. If your moral development reaches up into the trans-personal levels, then you tend to be St. Teresa. But some, like Picasso, have their cognitive development very high but their moral development is in the bloody basement. We think someone is enlightened in every aspect of their lives, but that’s rarely the case.

You have many admirers. You also have critics. One objection is that you are too full of yourself. The science writer John Horgan, in his book “Rational Mysticism,” said the vibe he got from you was, “I’m enlightened. You’re not.” How do you respond to this charge of arrogance, the sense that you’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe and no one else has?

A lot of people see me as much more humble. I continue to change because I’m open to new ideas and I’m very open to criticism. Basically, I’ve taken the answers that have been given by the great sages, saints and philosophers and have worked them into this integral framework. If that vibe comes across as arrogant, then John would get that feeling. Of course, he was trying to do the same thing, so I would have brushed up against his own egoistic projections. But some people do agree with him and feel that my support for this integral framework comes across as arrogant.

All I’ve done is provide a map. We’re always updating it, always revising it, based on criticism and feedback and new evidence. You see those maps that Columbus and the early explorers drew of North and South America, where Florida is the size of Greenland? That’s how our maps are. What’s surprising to me is the number of savvy people who’ve expressed support for my work.

About a year ago, you nearly died from a grand mal seizure, which triggered more seizures. From what I heard, you were on life support systems. You almost bit off your tongue. Weren’t you unconscious for several days?

I did have 12 grand mal seizures in one evening. I was rushed to the E.R. comatose. I was in a coma for four days. During that time, I had electric paddles put on my heart three times. I was on dialysis because my kidneys had failed. I developed pneumonia. Ken Wilber was unconscious but Big Mind was conscious. Ken Wilber came to on the fourth day.

Are you saying some part of you was aware of what was going on, even though you were unconscious?

Yes. This is a very common experience of longtime meditators. There is an awareness during waking, dreaming and deep sleep states.

I’m having trouble understanding this. Some part of you was aware of the people moving around you?

There was a dim awareness of the room. It did include people moving in and out of the room and people sitting by the table. It did include certain procedures being done. But there wasn’t a Ken Wilber as a subject relating to things that were happening. There was no separate self. Ken Wilber, if he were conscious, presumably would be upset or would be happy when the heart started beating again. But there were none of those reactions because there was just this Big Mind awareness, this nondual awareness.

The way you talk about this, it doesn’t sound like such a bad experience! I would’ve thought this would be horrible.

[Laughs] Exactly. When you listen to more conventional near-death experiences, they don’t sound so bad either. In any event, I was told that I would take quite a while to recover. But I walked out of the hospital two days later, with everything normal. So I put that down in part to my own spiritual practice and the rejuvenating capacity that this awareness has.

Does the prospect of dying frighten you?

Not really. What comes up is just thoughts of how much work in the world there is still to do. And with this recent experience — letting me know that Big Mind is what there is — that fundamental fear of dying has basically left. Still, when someone asks if I have a fear of dying, I find myself hesitating. What goes through my mind is positive stuff — friends that I would lose and work that needs to be done.

In “Swimming in a Sea of Death,” Rieff wrestles with how to be a dutiful son to his dying mother while being true to himself. It’s a remarkably unsentimental account. There’s no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. This is not a portrait of Rieff’s relationship with Sontag, though at one point he refers to their “strained and at times very difficult” relations. It is a book about dying, grieving and what it means to survive the death of a loved one.

Beginning in the 1960s, Sontag became a cultural critic with enormous range, dissecting everything from camp to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, from photography to how illness is misread as a metaphor for patients’ psychology. She was a best-selling novelist and a singular presence — the brainy, glamorous woman who held her own among the testosterone-filled intellectuals of the period.

Rieff is a distinguished author in his own right. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and a past contributor to Salon, he’s reported on war-ravaged countries and carved out his own reputation as an acute analyst of foreign policy. Rieff refers to writing as “the family olive oil business.” His father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, wrote his own masterpiece, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud.” Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. In her later years, she had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for one loaded comment about the photographer’s “carnival images of celebrity death.”

“I am not a confessional person,” Rieff insisted. He could be terse when fielding questions about his relationship with his mother, and he became angry at the notion she suffered a “bad death.” Still, throughout our interview, he displayed his own brand of remarkable candor.

When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer?

It was in the spring of 2004. I was coming back from about a month in Israel/Palestine, where I was trying to do a story on Yasser Arafat. I have a habit — a superstition, really — of not calling people I’m close to while I’m on an assignment that could be dangerous. But I usually check in once I get out. I had to change planes at Heathrow Airport in London, so I called my mother. She said she might be ill again, might have some kind of blood cancer. She was trying to be cheerful. I was trying to be cheerful. Then I flew back. The next morning, I picked her up and accompanied her to the doctor who gave her the test results. The physician was not a very empathetic guy. I’m sure he’s a good doctor, but his human skills were not exactly brilliant. And he told her the bad news. She had this lethal blood cancer and, basically, there was no treatment.

It was a death sentence.

It was. The standard time between diagnosis and death is nine months, and there are no drugs that work more than a few months to keep your blood counts where they’re supposed to be. It turned out that if she wanted to try something rather than palliative care during the last months of her life, there was one possibility. It’s a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow transplant. She found a physician at the great cancer center in New York, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a brilliant man who had all the human skills the first doctor did not. He said, “If you want to fight, if what matters to you is not quality of life…” And my mother said, “I’m not interested in quality of life.” He said, “Well, the best place to have this transplant would be at the Fred Hutchinson Center at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle.”

So she was going to do everything she could to survive.

She wanted to live at any price. When she said, “I’m not interested in quality of life,” she meant it. She was somebody for whom extinction — death — was unbearable. So she was going to fight for every breath, no matter how much suffering that entailed.

Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. One time, weren’t the odds incredibly stacked against her?

They were. This was in the mid-’70s, a time when American physicians tended to lie to their patients and tell family members something closer to the truth. I was told by her doctors that she would die quite soon. She had Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lymph system. She had a basis for thinking it wasn’t hopeless when a doctor said it was.

Yet this time it did seem hopeless.

The chances were indeed stacked against her. But she didn’t want to hear it. So what do you do, as the person who’s close to someone who wants to live at any price, when you think this fight isn’t worth it? Do you lie? Do you insist on telling the truth when it’s perfectly clear the person doesn’t want to know the truth? Which was certainly true of my mother.

Even though she did say, “Don’t lie to me.”

She wanted to be lied to. I mean, she didn’t want to be lied to, but she wanted to live. She hoped that I and other people in her life would give her reason to hope. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. Before the transplant, I thought the odds were bad. Coming back to my mother’s previous experience with breast cancer, I thought, “Well, don’t leap to conclusions here. They wrote her off in the ’70s. Yeah, it’s an even more lethal cancer, and yeah, she’s even 30 years older, but maybe she’ll beat the odds.” But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took place, I didn’t think she would make it. Yet every signal she was giving me was, “Give me hope. Help me believe I might make it.” In the end, I chose to do that. The most important thing I thought was: It’s her death, not mine.

Can you tell me about your mother’s last days?

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. She suffered like someone being tortured. I found a way to be present but not look at the way she had become physically. She flew back to New York when it was clear the leukemia had become full-blown and the transplant had failed, and spent the last six or seven weeks of her life in Memorial Sloan-Kettering. In the end she couldn’t even roll over unassisted.

Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. And I really looked. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. And she was just a sore. Her body was just a sore from the inside of her mouth to her toes. So the suffering was extraordinary. But the actual death was comparatively easy in the sense that she didn’t seem to be in pain. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. And when she spoke, she spoke about the distant past — about her parents, about people she was involved with 30 years before. She wasn’t focused on the present or any of us. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. And then she died. It wasn’t terrible.

Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you?

It exacted a tremendous price. I never got to say goodbye. I don’t want to romanticize the end of life, but we never had the kinds of conversations I would’ve liked to have had with her. Conversations about the past. I would’ve liked to have said certain things to her. We had a complicated relationship. There were very good times and very bad times between us. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. But that’s impossible if you decide not to acknowledge the fact of dying. So that’s the price I paid. But she made it very clear what she wanted. I didn’t feel that my interests could be put ahead of that.

You write that it wasn’t just that she desperately wanted to live, she was also terrified of dying. Wasn’t there a kind of existential dread?

There was. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. I’ve also met lots of people who aren’t. But she was one to whom it was just terrible news. So I don’t think she was at all unique. Of course, some people of faith find it easier. But my mother wasn’t a person of faith.

Your mother was an atheist. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. How much did that contribute to her dread?

Well, I’m an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. You shouldn’t start to believe because it suits you.

But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread?

Well, it sure doesn’t help. I don’t know. There are certainly religious traditions that don’t believe in an afterlife. So I don’t think we can just take the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife are what religious faith is. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. So I’m not sure it’s faith vs. atheism.

These days, there’s a lot of talk about what’s called “a good death.” Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. There’s a certain grace that can follow. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some “closure.” By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. Do you see it that way?

No, I think that’s something people say to console themselves. I don’t believe a word of what you just said. I don’t know whether you believe it or not. But I know this argument very well. First of all, I think that argument does a real disservice to human variety. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. It’s like saying all human beings should be cheerful. I don’t know that being cheerful is better than being a melancholy person. People have different temperaments. When you say “grace,” it lets family members off the hook. They don’t have to feel so bad that the person is going. So I don’t buy it.

I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die. Given who she was, there was no other way.

What I’m saying is that the right way for one person to die may not be the right way for another person to die. And she was somebody who desperately didn’t want to die. So why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully? That doesn’t seem right to me.

She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where many famous writers are buried. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. Do you know why that was?

Sure. Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. If you have a grave and your bones are there, it’s somehow less confirming of extinction. I understand that viscerally. She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she was. But all the decisions about her burial are decisions that I made, trying to think through what I thought she wanted. She gave me no instructions of any kind.

You have just a brief reference to Annie Leibovitz, your mother’s off-and-on companion for 20 years. You call her book of photos — which included pictures of your mother as she was dying and after her death — “carnival images of celebrity death.” There seems to be a good deal of bitterness packed into that short sentence.

There is, but it’s contained in that sentence. And that’s all I propose to say about Annie Leibovitz.

You have been a writer for many years, but to my knowledge, it’s only been quite recently that you’ve written this directly about your mother. Not only did you write this memoir, you’re also editing her diaries and helping put out some of her unpublished essays. Why have you taken this active role in your mother’s work?

That’s a good question. One answer is because I’ll probably do a better and more responsible job than someone who didn’t know her. If I’m going to edit stuff about her life in the ’50s, I’m the only one alive who would know about it directly. Another answer is that if I had her journals in my possession after she died, and they were simply mine to dispose of as I wished, I don’t think I would have published them. I don’t know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I’m dead. But I’m fairly certain I would not have published them.

But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. And she didn’t embargo them. So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. What I’ve left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. It’s not as if I burned anything.

Near the end of the book, you say, “I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it so say that they were often strained and at times very difficult.” Can you explain why they were difficult?

No, I think that explains it. What I will say, though, is that when I wrote this book, I thought a lot about what I’d say and what I wouldn’t say. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. That doesn’t mean someone else who was there would agree with my account.

But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. And that may be because I didn’t want to have a fight with somebody, because I didn’t want to offend somebody, because I thought I’d hurt somebody’s feelings, or because I just preferred that something not be known. I’m just not prepared to talk in any seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother.

So I felt what I needed to do was not give the false impression that somehow our relations had been very good, but instead to say they were very complicated. And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. It was important to have that on the record. But I wasn’t going to say anything more. I’m not a confessional writer. I’m not a confessional person. This is all very new territory to me.

It seems that something has changed for you, and you wanted to engage with your mother more directly in print.

I wanted to engage with her death in print. But I shall not write a biography. I will write prefaces to these journals, which will contain biographical material, and a future biographer may find them somewhat useful. But I didn’t want to write a book about my relationship with my mother, about her relations with other people, or a literary account of her work.

Do you think you will ever write about your relationship with your her?

God, I hope not.

Why not?

Because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business. It’s just prurient as far as I’m concerned.

But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. You could set the record straight.

Oh, you never set the record straight. People write what they want to write. When Max Brod wrote the famous first biography of Kafka, every future biographer has tried to point out what Max Brod left out. Anyway, I don’t want to write a biography of my mother. I don’t want to write a memoir of our relationship. But on the other hand, I’m a realist. I can’t stop people from writing biographies after her death, any more than she could stop any number of biographies, one of them extremely disobliging, from appearing during her lifetime. It’s just the way of the world.

Your book is remarkably self-effacing. At one point you say, “That my mother both enjoyed and made better use of the world than I have done or will do is simply a statement of fact.” You also write that you wish you’d complied more with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. Aren’t you being awfully hard on yourself?

No, I don’t think so. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. A lot of what I describe in this book has nothing to do with the particular personality of David Rieff, or the particular personality, let alone celebrity, of Susan Sontag. From my experience in hospital wards, talking to family members of dying people, I think that a lot of what I describe is the common experience of people. I hope the book is helpful in that way.

So it’s wrong for me to read into this that you wish you had put some of your own needs aside and accommodated your mother more?

I do wish that. But I know it’s preposterous. I think it’s the commonplace guilt of survivors. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. That seems just right. The other part — that she made better use of the world — I don’t think that’s self-effacing. That’s a fact. If there’s one thing I’m vain about, it’s that I’m willing to stare facts in the face. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. She did more things in the world than I do. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. Those are all facts. I don’t think that’s a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say.

As you look back over your mother’s career, how do you think she’ll be remembered? How should she be remembered?

I hope she’ll be remembered as a person who did good work, was serious, and didn’t give in to the kind of cheap easy way outs that intellectuals in our culture so often give in to. As far as the relevance or importance of her work in the context of the long history of literature and criticism, I think history will sort that out. That’s above my pay grade to say.

I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. I was stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the ’60s and that made her famous. When I asked her about one of her early critiques of the novel, in which she wrote, “I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful,” she called that comment “juvenilia,” and said, “It’s really hard to be nailed to what one wrote 35 or 40 years ago.” And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, “I can do so much more as a novelist.” Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays?

It’s funny. I think she’s right. And the idea that one is going to think the same thing at 68, or whenever you did the interview, as one did at 31 would suggest lack of growth.

Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years?

I think [her 1992 novel] “The Volcano Lover” is the best thing she ever did.

But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the ’60s and ’70s. She was a cultural critic of renown who had fascinating things to say about art and the avant-garde, not to mention various writers. You’re saying that’s not how she should be remembered in the future?

It’s not for me to say how she should be remembered. I’m not Solon the law giver. I don’t think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very much to do with the quality of her work. It’s indisputable, as you say, that that’s what brought her to national and then international attention. But that doesn’t mean that was what was most valuable about her work. But I don’t think she would have repudiated a lot of the essays she wrote. It’s just that she changed her mind about the novel. She was much more interested in experimental art when she was young than she became later in life. She didn’t want to be an essay writer, but she continued to write essays, although they came harder and harder throughout her career.

Your mother was an iconic figure in intellectual circles, not just because of what she wrote but how she looked and acted. Women in particular talked about her enormous cultural significance. She became the model of an intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral profundity. Why do you think she gained that stature?

Why people capture imaginations is a mysterious process. I agree with you entirely that she captured the imagination of a certain time and became famous, and then I think did really good work and backed it up. But why she became so celebrated, what the combination of elements were — her public role in the anti-Vietnam movement and other political events; her looks — I’m sure it was a complicated combination.

I’m sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. Did you feel privileged? Intimidated?

No, not intimidated. It was a complicated experience. I felt lots of things, not all of them resting easily together. I had very complicated feelings, as one does about one’s parents. I mean, this book may be of interest because people have heard of my mother. If that’s what it is, there’s nothing I can do about it. I hope it has some relevance to people who’ve never heard of Susan Sontag, let alone of me. But I can’t control how people read a book. In fact, I think once you write a book, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago in Vogue magazine. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. You’re wearing a John Lennon cap.

Yeah, it’s an Irving Penn picture.

Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age?

You mean the Macaulay Culkin syndrome? [Pause] I took it for granted in the world that I grew up in. I didn’t think it was particularly odd. I knew children of well-known people in my school and other places. “Heady?” I wouldn’t have said.

Do you think you became a writer because of your mother’s example?

No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. I don’t mean in the sense that she opposed it. On the contrary, she was very pleased that I was a writer and encouraged me in every way. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. Fortunately, I don’t keep my journals. So after I’m gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. Also, I wasn’t a prodigy. My mother was a prodigy as a child.

When I say “in spite of,” what I mean is that when I saw that I still wanted to write in my early 20s, I thought very consciously, “Oh, if I become a writer, I will spend the first 10 years of my career having anyone who reviews a book of mine say, ‘David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s son.’” And I didn’t want to go through that. And I was too unwilling to pay that price, so it took me a long time to become a writer and pay that price, which I did. For the first 10 years of my career, that’s indeed what happened. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother.

Do you think it’s not an accident that the area you carved out for yourself as a writer — going to war-torn countries and covering foreign affairs — was very different from what your mother wrote about?

It wasn’t conscious but it certainly makes sense. I never thought about it. But I’m sure it’s true. It’s too obvious not to be true.

I’ve heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. What happened to those books?

They were sold to UCLA.

So not just her papers, but the books, too?

Yes, the library as well. It’s all at UCLA.

You didn’t want the books yourself?

They weren’t mine to keep. She’d sold them. I have a library anyway. I come from a line of people who have private libraries. It’s a weird thing in this age of the Internet. My mother had a big library. My father had a big library. I have a big library. They’re stand-alone projects.