– Around Science, Buddhism and a Life of Enquiry

I want to talk about science and Buddhism, but both words are so big. What I can talk about is what it has been like to spend most of a lifetime as a scientist and a technologist, while also spending more than fifty years meditating, studying Buddhism and eventually becoming and being an Order member.I think the interesting question for me is what it has been like to live inside both forms of enquiry, and what this has done to this person doing the enquiring.

Beginnings

I was born in Glasgow, one of eight children. Both my parents were family doctors. We had a housekeeper, and the house could be full of children — our own family plus friends, perhaps twenty on a weekend afternoon coming and going. Looking back, my early life sometimes feels almost like being part of a hive mind. I was born with crossed eyes with a correcting operation at 5.

From early on there was a sense that I was a child to be worried about. I was educationally slow and subject to educational phycologists. After a couple of years at Fernhill school run by the sisters of notradame. I think at 7 ½ I had much to learn. I spent the next year at a small almost montessori school run by a Miss Travers a friend of my mum’s. By the end of that year I could read and could do quite complicated multiplication and division in my head.

From then on home was mostly happy, apart from a homicidal older brother, and School was not.

School years

Unfortunately for me or possibly through the influence of my parents I passed the entrance examination for St Aloysius primary school and three miserable years. Within about a year I could hardly read or count under pressure. Homework that was wrong had to be done again; it accumulated; and eventually there was physical punishment for incompetence. I had several fairly miserable years there. I was reprieved for the final primary year being placed in the local catholic state school ,

St Mirren’s. I somehow past the entrance exam to St Aloysius Secondary run by the Jesuits, and experienced another 4 unhappy years. More on St Aloyisous later.

With my difficulty in early education, by my mid-teens my expectations were modest but quite acceptable. I thought I might learn a trade.

That is curious in retrospect because all eight of us eventually got degrees. But I was left with very low confidence despite becoming an academic for most of my adult life.

The insecurity established in those early years travelled with me for a very long time. It diminished, but it followed me through university, research, PhD work and well into adult life.

Curiosity Outside School

At the same time something else was going on.

With so many children in the family, it was quite easy to disappear for a day, especially at weekends in summer. From about eight I had a surprising amount of freedom in Glasgow. I would get on a bus and go to the Barras market.

I was fascinated by stalls selling old electronic components — resistors, capacitors, valves, switches, bits of technology from the 1940s and 50s. I got to know some of the older traders and occasionally visited them at home to see their radio equipment and transceivers.

I was lucky. Nothing bad happened to me.

At home I remember putting electric bulbs into Lego buildings, motors into Meccano cranes, and once making a sort of boat from a biscuit tin with a motor and propeller and launching it on Queen’s Park pond.

Later I read a children’s story about a boy who meets a boy next door who uses a wheelchair. The boy in the wheelchair is the expert. He has a ham-radio transceiver in a hut at the end of the garden.

What stayed with me was the idea that you could build something and communicate across the world.

I would not say that caused my interest in science. But it was one strand among several. I built crystal sets, then regenerative AM radios, then small AM transmitters.

So there was already a relationship with physical science which had little to do with school. It came through wandering, looking, talking to people, taking things apart and making things work.

Becoming separate

In my mid-teens something shifted.

I had been brought up in a strong Catholic environment. My mother rather hoped there might be a priest in the family and I had been vaguely marked out as a possibility. Fainting in the seminary church at about ten had already made that slightly less likely.

Then one day, walking down past the school, I had what I have rather grandly called an epiphany.

The thought was roughly this: I would not wish this treatment on anybody. So why is God supposed to be more jealous, punitive and vengeful than I am?

That was important. For perhaps the first time I was applying my own moral judgement to the authority that had formed me.

Something began to individuate.

I changed my friends. I moved towards people interested in girls, music, Cream, the Grateful Dead and the wider culture opening up around us.

My sister Gerry had already been there before me. She was into Hesse, Zen, alternative culture and intelligent boys in the arts. That rubbed off.

I began reading avidly — Hesse, Tolstoy, Asimov, later Pirsig and whatever else came my way. Music mattered too: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds. At one point Gerry ironed my long black hair straight so that I would look a little more like Neil Young. Or so we hoped.

So by the time I went to university I was not particularly confident, but I was technically curious, widely read, interested in meditation and already beginning to form a world of my own.

Science and Caring Teachers

About twenty of us were asked to leave St Aloysius after fourth year. We had become obstreperous and, as I remember it, were regarded as a bit of a risk to the school’s examination results.

I went to Holyrood Sen Secondary for my final two years. The teachers there were caring.That mattered enormously.I got strong results in Physics and Chemistry and enough in Maths and English to get into Chemistry at Strathclyde.

There were more than two hundred chemistry students in first year. The Applied Physics had about 10 students and followed much the same first year programme. Before arriving I had decided that I really wanted to do physics. I was told I could transfer if I passed everything. So I did. That was how I started towards being an applied physicist.

Meditation before Buddhism

At roughly the same time another strand had begun.

I started meditating seriously in my late teens. My sources were not terribly respectable. Lobsang Rampa and Carlos Castaneda featured heavily. Lobsang Rampa might be described as the Arthur Daley of the Buddhist world. Whatever one thinks of his authenticity, some of the practices were effective for me. I would often drink quite a lot of beer in the evening, which was perhaps not ideal preparation, then around midnight walk two or three miles through Glasgow, letting the mind settle. I would come home and meditate between about one and three in the morning.

The practice involved withdrawing attention from bodily sensation and from discursive thought. Eventually body sensation could disappear. Thought could disappear. Then pīti — energy or rapture — and other experiences would arise. Some of those states were very clear and powerful. At university I sometimes had what felt almost like a photographic memory when studying. I would not claim meditation caused that; youth, adrenaline and obsession probably helped.

From Meditation to Sangha

I had discovered directly that the mind was trainable. But there were costs. Sometimes I experienced what felt like an intensely evil presence in the room — pure malevolence. I am not making an ontological claim about that, but the experience was vivid.

I also began having episodes where bodily sensation would switch off spontaneously even outside meditation. At night the body could disappear from awareness, accompanied by intermittent rushing or hissing sounds in the ears. I also developed severe recurrent pain in my right eye, which I associated with the extreme wilfulness of the practice.

Those symptoms stayed around for years.Eventually I replaced those practices with mindfulness of breathing and mettā. Things gradually became more integrated and safer, although those practices did not give rise to the same existential intensity.

That left me with a healthy respect for meditation. Depth is not necessarily wisdom. Intensity is not necessarily integration.

Imaginal Experience

There were also what I would then have called out-of-body experiences. One remains extraordinarily vivid. I remember passing through my bedroom door, floating down the stairs, looking into a mirror and not seeing myself. So I pinched my backside. It hurt. That was interesting.

Then I passed through the front door and went off into the Glasgow night sky. For many years I put experiences like that down to imagination. I am less certain now. I regard it as possible that they were genuine experiences of what people have called astral projection. But even if that were so, phenomenologically I would still put them in the imaginal realm rather than ordinary sensory perception. I increasingly think that many ontological questions are better left open.

We can take experience seriously without always deciding what ultimately exists.

London and the PhD

After university I went to London to do a PhD.

I was still fairly insecure and, in many ways, rather pedestrian. The research was physically and technically demanding. I was building ultra-high-vacuum systems, ion guns, energy filters and quadrupole mass spectrometers for SIMS work. I had four years of bursary support, but money was very tight. I was doing technically sophisticated experimental physics while sometimes struggling to pay rent and eat adequately. When the bursary ended I taught science for a year and then went back to Glasgow to stay with my parents because I simply could not afford to remain in London and write up. I later started work at GEC Hirst.

Only when I was securely and successfully established there did I finally manage to finish the thesis. I sometimes think I completed it largely for my mother’s appreciation. There is another small absurdity. I had built a computer, installed a word processor and written software to analyse and draw the SIMS mass spectra. I submitted the thesis, and it was rejected because it had been printed on a dot-matrix printer rather than typed on a typewriter. My sister Grace gave me two weeks of her time. We went to a cottage on the Solway Firth and redrafted it. Eventually the PhD was awarded.

Competence and confidence are not the same thing.

Applied Science

At GEC Hirst I really did begin to become a successful scientist and technologist. I started as a process development engineer specialising in plasma etching and deposition, with wider responsibility across semiconductor fabrication processes — bipolar devices, CMOS and CCDs. I worked with silicon, silicon-on-sapphire, later high-temperature superconductors and Josephson-junction devices.

Later at City University came optical sensing, laser Doppler anemometry, environmental monitoring, neural networks, data analysis and risk modelling and running the media communications undergraduate programme with about 30 students a year and a research group with a few PhD students. Most of my scientific career was really technology development. That matters. Applied science gives you a particular sort of knowledge. Some of it is explicit, but some becomes intuitive. You acquire a feel for systems: what variables matter, what can be ignored, what is stable, what becomes unstable, how a disturbance propagates, and how one state can become another.

You also learn that a model can be extremely useful without being the thing itself.

Relationships

Science was never the whole story. People repeatedly opened my life.

Ingrid was important. After I was caught in a bedsit fire and needed somewhere to live, she took me under her wing and then rather took me by the ear. We hitchhiked through Europe and the United States. Later there was a painful period in which relationships had become tangled and I eventually felt the only way through was to break with two people I cared about.

By then I had my own flat in London, was becoming successful at GEC, and Buddhism was becoming serious. A colleague at GEC gave me books including A Buddhist Bible and Dhyana for Beginners. What a book.

Books, meditation, retreats and people kept arriving together.

Buddhism Becomes Serious

By the mid-1980s you could often find me doing a double meditation and puja at the London Buddhist Centre and then going to the Rose and Crown in Mare Street to drink beer and play pool. That is where I made some very dear friends among these , Liz. Liz and I have now been together for more than forty years. In the scheme of things in Triratna, that is quite a long time. I could devote a whole talk to Liz and me. I will only say that I have felt almost honour-bound to her from very near the beginning. I don’t remember it as a great falling-in-love or being besotted. It was more that I cared for her, and we somehow chose to accompany one another through half a lifetime. There has been care, friendship and quite a bit of collusion between us drinking after long commutes and days work. The corollary was also true. We could be very effective together. We paid off our mortgage in ten years, and we have repeatedly supported one another’s creative efforts and changes of direction. For good and bad — though with Liz there has been remarkably little bad. Some of the more difficult periods came while working out how our relationship fitted with my involvement in Triratna. That image of meditation and puja and the rose and crown and pool and girls probably captures my Buddhist life quite well. Meditation and puja. Beer and pool. Not two entirely separate worlds.

The Buddhist Life

I studied a great deal of Buddhism. I did the Mitra study course about three times. Over the years I went on more than fifty retreats and retreat weekends at Padmaloka. Vajraloka had been especially important for meditation -Padmaloka was different. It was concerned much more explicitly with Going for Refuge, spiritual friendship, commitment and preparation for ordination. So Buddhism was not a light parallel interest. I spent a great deal of time putting myself through its practices and training.

Testing the Buddhist Life

At one point I did something rather less pedestrian.In 1987 I resigned from GEC. My time at GEC was a very positive experience and I have several dear friends from those years. Anyway, I sold my flat, moved into a community flat in east london. And I gave roughly half the money away from sale of my flat to the London Buddhist Centre and other Buddhist ventures, and about a year of my time to the LBC. I cleaned. Looked after shrines. Helped with the bookshop. Did whatever needed doing. Liz was shocked. But she stayed.

It was not altogether easy for a heterosexual scientist in his mid-thirties to fit into the culture of the LBC at that time. After about a year I had the feeling I was not really going anywhere and I missed talking to scientist. So I went back into science. Through an old PhD friend, Bev Meggitt, I took a research fellowship at City University working on laser Doppler anemometry. That taught me something useful. Giving up science did not automatically make me a better Buddhist. Science and Buddhism would run together.

Ordination and Friendship

I asked to join what was then the Western Buddhist Order, but the process took me twenty-two years. At one stage I withdrew my request because I did not feel my personal connections with the Order were sufficient. That was not lack of practice. There had been years of study, meditation and retreats. The missing piece was mostly spiritual friendships. Two people became particularly important.

Bodhivamsa and I became good friends whilst mitras, when Liz and I moved to Colchester. Years later, when I felt there was probably no route by which I was ever going to get ordained, Bodhivamsa said that he would ordain me.That required him to undertake the training and become authorised to do so. He did. And eventually he ordained me.

Vajradaka was also important.At one point I thought, with unusual clarity, that what I really needed was someone like Vajradaka to move down from Vajraloka and mentor me. I did not ask him. But I found he had left Vajraloka and moved to Mile End Road, about three miles from me. Fortuitous Happenstance. I began seeing him every couple of weeks to talk about meditation and practice. After about a year he moved about half a mile away. For years he supported my Buddhist practice and meditation, and I remain enormously grateful.

Agency

Looking back, one theme running through my life is a lack of agency. I have often been competent without being particularly self-propelled. Academically, I probably had the opportunity to push further towards becoming a professor. At one point I could have applied for a readership and did not even lodge the application. My calculation was that the extra work was considerable, the financial reward insignificant, and it would interfere with Buddhist practice. That was rational. But it also fits an older pattern. Ability and agency have not always travelled together.

The insecurity of the early years — crossed eyes, being a concern to my parents, difficulty at school, punishment and fear — seems to have travelled down the years with me. I could achieve things while still not entirely trusting the person achieving them. And yet perhaps agency is not always the heroic individual simply deciding everything and making it happen. My life has been profoundly relational. People have repeatedly opened possibilities that I then stepped into.

Science, Buddhism and Meaning Space -1

Decades of applied physics, chemistry and mathematics have left me with an intuitive sense of certain kinds of system. I now find some of those intuitions useful in thinking about mind. One idea is state space: the set of states a system could in principle occupy, and the trajectories by which it moves between them.

A meaning space can be thought of in that way. How large is it? How big is the context. How sparse? How limited is its field of view.What regions in it are easily accessible and which are difficult to reach? What are the attractors? – the rabbit holes. What constrains movement? – keeps the mind in its model.What perturbation allows a system to move somewhere genuinely new?

That seems useful to me when thinking about mental states, about Buddhist formulations such as the Abhidharma, and now about AI. I am not saying that the mind is literally a physical state space or that Abhidharma is physics. Analogy is an instrument of enquiry, not an identity claim.

Buddhist practice gives one kind of familiarity with mental states from inside experience. Applied science gives me another kind of intuition about dynamics, constraint, transition and emergence. More recently AI has brought those strands together again.

I am less interested in simply asking, “Is AI conscious?” That tends to collapse too quickly into ontology. I am more interested in what we can observe: how meaning changes, how attention alters what becomes available, how perturbations propagate, how stable patterns arise, and how intelligence, attention, awareness and agency relate.

What Buddhism has changed

I do not have a spectacular yet. I have had some deep meditation experiences and some very unusual ones. But nothing I would call shattering enlightenment. What I can say is that after all these years I am substantially Buddhist.

Not entirely though. I probably have more friends outside the Buddhist community than within it. I remain close to old university friends. Family remains enormously important. I feel slightly on the fence but would rather come down of it. But Buddhist practice has changed me and it provides my view of mind and matter. I think I am warmer. Kinder. Happier. Much more able to remain with uncertainty.

And now, at seventy-two, I am content and feel warm to the life I have actually lived.I am kind to myself. Not merely because self-kindness is pleasant, but because a harsher stance stymies development.

Gratitude

When I look back, what strikes me most is how many people have sustained this rather pedestrian exploration of life. Family. Partners. Friends. Scientists. Buddhists. Colleagues. Teachers.

People who gave me books, jobs, encouragement, accommodation, time, challenge, friendship and trust. Some took my quest seriously at times when I was not very good at taking myself seriously. Whatever understanding I have of science, Buddhism or mind has not been arrived at alone.

Summing Up : So I do not have a theory of science and Buddhism. I have a life in which both have mattered. Science taught me to look carefully at the world, build things, test ideas and respect evidence. Buddhism has taught me — and is still teaching me — to look at the person doing the looking. Neither has given me final certainty. In fact, I am increasingly comfortable leaving many ontological questions open. What matters more to me now is whether enquiry remains alive. Whether it enlarges rather than closes experience. Whether it makes us a little more capable of seeing clearly. And perhaps a little kinder. At seventy-two, that seems enough to be getting on with.