Photo courtesy of Margarita
Delgado
Biography
I was born in southern Germany on March 8, 1936. With much
enthusiasm, I studied botany, zoology, chemistry, philosophy
and pedagogy at several universities in Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland. After receiving my doctorate, with summa cum
laude, in systematic botany from the University of Munich, I
spent one year at the University of Alberta with Ludwig von
Bertalanffy, one of the founders of General Systems Theory,
and another year at the University of California with E.M.
Gifford and L. Stebbins. Then, as assistant, associate, and
full professor, I spent 33 years in the departments of botany
and biology of McGill University in Montreal, P.Q. In 1997 I
retired as emeritus professor and moved to Kingston in
Ontario.
At McGill University I taught courses in botany, general
biology, the history and philosophy of biology, and biology
in relation to the human predicament. I carried out research
on the
development and evolution of flowering
plants,
continuum and process
morphology, the power and
limitations of science, and the philosophy of biology. My research led me from
plant morphology to infinite issues (including Ken Wilber
and Korzybski).
At Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (that became
Naropa University) I taught a summer course on Modern
Biology and Zen.
My publications comprise nearly a hundred papers, book
chapters and books. Although predominantly on topics
of plant
morphology, some
of them deal with various aspects of biology, alternative
holistic medicine, philosophy, and spirituality.
I lectured at many universities around the world, including
Harvard University, and the Universities of California,
Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Delhi, Malaya, and Singapore. I
presented papers at many national and international
conferences and symposia and also organized symposia at
international congresses. To learn more about the relation of
science and spirituality, I attended several symposia on
science and consciousness. In 1995 I was invited to give a
talk on the relation of science, especially life science, and
spirituality at the 60th birthday celebrations of the Dalai
Lama.
I received many honors and awards. In 1973 I became a fellow
of the Linnean Society of London (F.L.S.), in 1982 I was
elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (F.R.S.C.),
and in 1995 I received an honorary doctorate (D.Sc.) from the
Open International University for Complementary Medicine at
Colombo, Sri Lanka, for my contributions to holistic
alternative medicine.
Since I retired in 1997, I research and write on broad and
integral topics of science, philosophy, and spirituality
(see Present Interests
and Publications). I give talks on various general
topics such as the relation of science and spirituality,
the importance of Yin-Yang, and alternative medicine.
Furthermore, I facilitate various types of meditation such
as dancing and laughing meditation, including
laughter yoga.
Photo courtesy of Shelley
Cohl
Flowers and
Mandalas
Flowers have fascinated and attracted me my whole life. As a
child, I enjoyed picking flowers for my beloved mother. Later
on, my doctoral thesis dealt with the development and
evolution of flowers. At McGill University initially my
research focussed on floral development. I developed a
technique to display floral development in three
dimensions. In
1973 I published with the help of students and technicians
the award-winning Organogenesis of Flowers. A
Photographic Text-Atlas. Although a scientific book, I underlined
also the aesthetic value of the photos. Both science and
art have always been important to me. In the 60s, during
the era of flower power, I taught a course on flowers.
Although predominantly scientific, this course also
included sections on the importance of flowers in art and
literature. I concluded the course with a polysensual
multi-media show of flowers in science, art, literature,
and everyday life.
As I have been exploring more deeply spiritual dimensions of
life, mandalas have become increasingly important for me.
Often they can be understood as symbolic representations of
the Kosmos including ourselves. Their center may be seen as
the source of everything, the source from which the
manifoldness of existence arises. One could also say that the
source represents the unmanifest from which manifest reality
arises. Being unmanifest, the source appears unnamable,
beyond words, mysterious, in contrast to manifest reality
that can be talked about. According to Daoism, specifically
the first chapter of Laozi's (Lao-Tzu's) Daode jing (Tao Te
Ching), heaven and earth, Yang and Yin, and everything that
can be named originate from the unnamable. Ultimately, the
namable and the unnamable are not two (one could say one).
According to the Heart Sutra of Buddhism that has greatly
inspired me, this wisdom has been expressed as: form is
emptiness and emptiness is form (see, for example, Tenzin
Gyatso, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 2005. Essence of the Heart
Sutra. Boston: Wisdom Publications).
In Wilber’s AQAL Map and
Beyond I
present a dynamic
mandala that can
be transformed in so many ways that it could comprise all
mandalas. Thus, this dynamic mandala could be seen as a
mandala of mandalas, or the set of all mandalas.
Flowers have been seen as mandalas because
they have a mandalic form. In bisexual flowers the female
organ(s), or, strictly speaking, the organ(s) that produce
the female sex, occupy their center. In this sense, the
center of flowers is not the unnamable, but part of form, the
namable. However, if in a more metaphorical sense, the
female, the feminine, is equated with the mysterious
unnamable, then a flower can be seen as a mandala in the
above sense. In the sixth chapter of the Daode jing (Tao Te
Ching), the “mystic female” can be interpreted as emptiness,
that is, the unnamable. In the mysterious Chinese text
The Secret of the Golden
Flower. The Chinese Book of Life, the golden flower is a symbol for light and
the One (see the translation by Richard Wilhelm with a
foreword and commentary by C.G. Jung, 1962. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul; and Osho.1999.The Secret of Secrets. Talks on The
Secret of the Golden Flower. The Rebel Publishing House).
David J. Bookbinder created a wonderful gallery and blog
on flower mandalas in which the source, the unnamble, is
represented implicitly or
explicitly. I am
grateful to David Bookbinder for giving me permission to
reproduce here one of his beautiful flower mandalas,
Violet Morning Glory I, in which the source is represented
explicitly as the empty center.
It does not seem a meaningless coincidence that during my
life I have been deeply attracted to flowers, mandalas, the
feminine, and the mystery beyond words.
Morning Glory Mandala. Courtesy of
David J. Bookbinder.
Both my scientific research and my
existential experiences and insights have validated the
profound wisdom of Yin-Yang. One of the key concepts of my
research in plant morphology
(the form of plants) has
been the continuum (see, for example, my publications
with Dr. Bernard Jeune and Professor Rolf
Rutishauser). In
the Yin-Yang symbol, this concept is emphasized through
the continuity of Yin and Yang, one merging gradually with
the other, which acknowledges a fuzziness that is very different from typical
Western thinking in terms of mutually exclusive categories
that oppose each other in an either/or fashion. Yin and
Yang also cooperate in contrast to the Western Darwinian
and capitalist emphasis on competition. Furthermore, they
complement each other. My research, and especially joint
publications with Dr. Rolf Rutishauser, have focused on
the importance of complementarity in plant morphology,
science, and society. Chapter 6 on Complementarity of Wilber’s AQAL Map
and Beyond also
deals with this topic.
In addition to continuity, cooperation, and complementarity,
Yin-Yang emphasizes dynamics. Yin and Yang change
continuously: while one increases, the other decreases. Alan
Watts wrote about Daoism as “The Watercourse Way”. Buddhism
also emphasizes impermanence as the hallmark of samsara, the
relative world that scientists investigate. In my research on
plant morphology, I developed a more dynamic approach that I
called process morphology or dynamic
morphology. This
approach is based on or compatible with process philosophy
and even calls for a verb-based process
language (see my
article Why do we
need a more dynamic study of morphogenesis? Descriptive
and comparative aspects. In: D. Barabé et R. Brunet (eds.)
Morphogenèse et Dynamique. Orbis, Frelighsburg,1993).
Although Yin and Yang change continuously, they tend toward a
balance. According to Chinese medicine, health is balance, a
dynamic balance. I emphasize this view of health in my
article on Non-conventional medicines and
holism (see
Publications), in Wilber’s AQAL Map and
Beyond, in Healing Thinking and
Being, and in Materialism,
Holism, and Mysticism - A Mandala.
Many other aspects of Daoism have become
very important to me in my personal life and living such as
paradox, wordlessness, silence (Dao cannot be talked about),
non-doing, spontaneity, playfulness, flexibility, softness,
gentleness, humility, wholeness, oneness, no-thingness,
emptiness, and suchness. Some of these are also typical of
Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, and other spiritual
traditions that have inspired me.
See also Present Interests
and Publications