Dr. Richard Dixey

I was strongly inspired when I was a teenager by the idea that scientific insight would explain everything. I remember the thrill of finding a textbook on Ecology when I was 14, and devouring its elegant descriptions of the natural world in terms of ecosystems and energy flows. This was in the 1960’s, a period when scientific triumphalism appeared to reign supreme — so aptly expressed by that amazing rectangular floating slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That shining slab took cavemen and showed them fire, and took medievals and showed them the stars. All the turbulence of my earlier childhood seemed to resolve in this orderly view of life and my place in it.

But as I matured from adolescence into young adulthood, doubts began to creep in. I had almost exclusively focused on scientific writing in my teens, but now, with a bigger view, I began slowly to realize that these analyses could never fully capture what it was to be a human being in this seemingly orderly array of physical processes.

After my first year at Oxford it was as if a dam broke. I took a year off and traveled overland to India. It was totally transformative. I found a world unlike anything I had seen before — a world in which spirituality was mainstream, a world in which the inner life mattered at least as much, if not more, than the outer. The world of belief and engagement was also real — but real in a different way from the world of things, processes and experiment. How could they be unified?

These two poles of my life — the scientific, rational world of experimental verification and the inner world of intuition and meaning — have informed most of my life. When I came back from India I completed my degree but did not take up scientific work. I eventually ran across an esoteric school specializing in the western esoteric tradition, and I was amazed to find how modernity, with its fixed views of what was rational and right, had hidden whole elements of experience that were central to the views of a medieval or earlier thinker. I explored ancient history — particularly Egypt, and the emergence of traditions in the Hellenistic age, and the long struggle that ensued with Christian orthodoxy. I discovered Tarot, Astrology, Alchemy, Gem healing, Kabbalah, and all its associations in numerology and magic. This was filling in a picture for sure, but so much of it was speculation and fantasy, not rooted in anything that could be relied upon.

It was here that I rediscovered my love for scientific analysis — that deeply communal activity where information was codified, formalized into systems that could themselves be subjected to experimental investigation. I founded a laboratory that researched Faith Healing in a major London hospital — whether there was any physical basis for the healing energies some people could use — and later matured my research into investigating whether electric and magnetic fields might play a role in these processes. Could some bridges between the inner and outer be forged by examining these traditions?

Later I founded a pharmaceutical company that looked exclusively at traditional medical systems and explored whether modern clinical techniques could establish their efficacy. I worked with ancient knowledge systems from China, Vietnam, and India, and also North and South Africa along with European herbal traditions. These years showed beyond reasonable doubt that precise knowledge of our external environment was not limited to what modern scientific techniques could uncover. There was another way of knowing our world, and our place in it.

During this period I re-engaged with Eastern spirituality, particularly Buddhism, and through new friends was introduced to my wonderful wife, Wangmo, the eldest daughter of Tarthang Rinpoche. Already I had had exposure to the ancient Wisdom Lineages, but here were lineages that were unbroken, stretching alive back into the most ancient antiquity. I began to see that in them my two poles could become complete — a circle of knowing and doing with a new focus at its center.

This new center can be summed up in a rather enigmatic phrase — the nature of mind. Informed by the deep explorations found in Buddhist materials, I realized finally that it is our educated and trained subjectivity that can unify the outer and inner worlds that seemed so irrevocably split to my younger self. The subjective, after all, is all we truly experience. It is this realization that has created my interest in Dharma College — a place where the subjective can be explored without rejection of modernity; a place where the unbroken wisdom lineages can find real engagement with the actual conditions of our technological age.

So this is what we do at Dharma College. We explore the nature of mind — understanding how we make our world, how we shape our experiences — but undertaking such explorations from the subjective rather than the external perspective. It is a transformative journey for those who join us. Once we have that understanding we have a firm basis to go further: to explore even more profoundly our human potentiality, to find anew a spiritual center that can unify all aspects of our experience whilst leaving nothing out. Finding the “and,” and transcending the “either / or,” is a great fruit of our work together.

These insights have physical as well as cognitive foundations. Right from my early days I have been going on small pilgrimages. Being British, I have in later years spent long periods making journeys in India and Tibet. All these places carry a charge — something deeply embodied. One such is the extraordinary island of Iona in the Western Hebrides of Scotland. With white sands and turquoise waters, and the red rocks of Laurentian granite — the oldest rock to be found on our planet — this small island was the burial place for the Lords of the Isles before becoming a center of Celtic Christianity. Its gift is one of wholeness — a promise that despite all our problems our humanity will triumph, not only through the improvement of our physical circumstance, but through the ever-deepening fount of being that is our birthright. It is this vision that inspires me, and I hope it does anyone who reads these words.