How to Change Your Mind

there are so many other descriptions. It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t
that be amazing?”
This is when Griffiths turned the tables and started asking me about
my own spiritual outlook, questions for which I was completely
unprepared.
“How sure are you there is nothing after death?” he asked. I demurred,
but he persisted. “What do you think the chances are there is something
beyond death? In percentages.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “Two or three percent?” To this day I
have no idea where that estimate came from, but Griffiths seized on it.
“That’s a lot!” So I turned the table back again, put the same question to
him.
“I don’t know if I want to answer it,” he said with a laugh, glancing at
my tape recorder. “It depends on which hat I’m wearing.”
Roland Griffiths had more than one hat! I only had one, I realized, and
that made me feel a little jealous.
Compared with many scientists—or for that matter many spiritual
types—Roland Griffiths possesses a large measure of what Keats,
referring to Shakespeare, described as “negative capability,” the ability to
exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for
absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality. “It makes no more
sense to say I’m 100 percent convinced of a material worldview than to
say I’m 100 percent convinced of the literal version of the Bible.”
At our last meeting, a dinner at a bistro in his Baltimore
neighborhood, I tried to engage Griffiths in a discussion of the ostensible
conflict between science and spirituality. I asked him if he agreed with E.
O. Wilson, who has written that all of us must ultimately choose: either
the path of science or the path of spirituality. But Griffiths doesn’t see the
two ways of knowing as mutually exclusive and has little patience for
absolutists on either side of the supposed divide. Rather, he hopes the
two ways can inform each other and correct each other’s defects, and in
that exchange help us to pose and then, possibly, answer the big
questions we face. I then read to him a letter from Huston Smith, the
scholar of comparative religion who in 1962 had volunteered in Walter
Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment. It was written to Bob Jesse shortly
after the publication of Griffiths’s landmark 2006 paper; Jesse had
shared it with me.