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Good morning, world. This is your wake-up call

Physicist-turned-futurist Peter Russell argues that only communal creativity can get us through current environmental and economic crises.

Peter Russell, perched on his houseboat in Sausalito, California, believes our best hope for the future is higher consciousness.

Photo: Charlie Nucci

Peter Russell, a Cambridge-trained physicist and futurist who has written about consciousness for four decades, should have been at a high point in his life. Fifteen years ago, Russell's book, The White Hole in Time, had just been published; he was a popular teacher and corporate consultant, his work lauded by leading thinkers.

But, Russell says, "I was feeling an inner disquiet. What I was saying in the talks was, 'If we could just break out of this old mode of consciousness and, in the spiritual sense, wake up to what we truly are and reconnect with that essential nature, then we could make it through.' Yet there was another voice in me saying, 'It's too late.'"

Russell realized that "even if we did [wake up], the problems of the world-the environment, climate change, the long-term effects of pollution-are still going to need sorting out." That led him to acknowledge that "whatever happens, we're moving into a world where there is going to be a lot of physical hardship and physical suffering. It's not going to be an easy ride. So I started looking at what's going to be needed in that world on a human level. We're going to need to be able to care for others, have compassion, help people with different forms of suffering. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that it didn't matter which scenario you took. We still need to be doing exactly the same inner work to free ourselves from a self-centered, rather short-sighted mode of consciousness into a more open, compassionate, caring mode of consciousness. Whatever the outcome, the same work is required."

Even in the midst of unprecedented economic and environmental crises, Russell, a bearded 62-year-old Brit, believes our best hope is higher consciousness. "My feeling is that we're only going to come through this safely if we can let go of the old ways of thinking and have some shifts in our consciousness," he says. "I don't know how it's going to play out but I know which team I want to play on. What I try to do in my life and my work is focus on helping people see the value of that inner exploration and see how to do that. For me, teaching meditation is a fundamental way of doing it. Behind all the crises is a deeper psychological issue. And the question we're not looking at is, Why do we get into these situations?"

The current economic turmoil brings those psychological issues to the surface. "This economic crisis is the first one that's really bringing up the fact that it's human self-interest, greed that's behind it," Russell says. "We can't blame nature or other nations, which I think is good because it's making us see that something in our own thinking needs to be looked at."

Russell and I met on his little houseboat in Sausalito, California. The cozy craft, cluttered with books, including a volume of poetry by Hafiz, a pair of conga drums, Buddhist figurines, plants and a dolphin mobile hanging from the low ceiling, was the ideal setting for a conversation with this thinker whose mind and body seem to be always on the move.

The boat, in a marina just north of San Francisco, is "as old as I am," Russell says with a laugh, and is his base. After jetting around the planet to lead consciousness workshops and revisit friends in his native England, Russell comes home to his tiny ark. Its portholes look out to the Belvedere hills, Angel Island and Alcatraz. The Golden Gate Bridge is beyond the Marin headlands, just out of view.

A day before, Russell had flown home from a two-month trip to England, New York's Omega Institute and the Azores of Portugal, where he led a workshop on meditation and yoga that included swimming with dolphins. Russell is the author of From Science to God and Waking Up In Time (an updated edition of The White Hole in Time), which presents his theory that breakthroughs in human consciousness could pull our species back from the brink of self-destruction. Some may view him as a New Age thinker. But his ideas are grounded in science.

During the 1960s, Russell studied physics at Cambridge University in England, and was mentored for a year under renowned mathematics professor Stephen Hawking. Russell began his university studies in math, but as he got close to getting his degree, he found he wanted answers to deeper questions. "How had hydrogen, the simplest of elements, evolved into creatures such as ourselves, able to reflect upon the immensity of the cosmos, understand its functioning and even study the mathematics of hydrogen?" Russell writes in From Science to God. "How had a transparent, odorless gas become a system that could be aware of itself? In short, how had the universe become conscious?"

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