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James O'Dea

Photo by Lori Eanes

October 2006 | Features

Violence Transforms

IONS’ James O’Dea’s Journey from the End of a Knife

By Traci Hukill

One evening in 1976, James O’Dea was making his way through the empty marketplace in the Turkish town of Izmir when he was attacked by a gang of young men. The political tensions that would erupt in a coup four years later were already brewing between left- and right-wing student factions, and the attackers mistook O’Dea, a visiting teacher, for a member of a rival group. By the time he convinced them that he was an Irishman and not a Turk, he’d been stabbed multiple times and was bleeding profusely.

The harrowing episode left a deep impression on O’Dea (pronounced O-Dee ) and launched his quest to understand the causes and effects of violence. His journey would eventually bring him to the cutting edge of social transformation, but first he had to complete an education of sorts.

Over the course of several years in the Middle East, O’Dea observed the peculiar ways in which violence can saturate a national psyche. In Turkey he watched adolescents cheer after the principal of a nearby school was stabbed to death. In Beirut he met a depressed grocery store clerk who in wartime had led Western news correspondents to Yasser Arafat’s bunker; when the war ended the man’s sense of purpose went with it. O’Dea began to understand the relationship between violent acts and the poisoned soil from which they spring. He saw that the rape of Bosnian girls and grandmothers had nothing to do with Serbian soldiers’ sexual appetites and everything to do with demoralizing a people.

Having been victim and witness to violence, O’Dea began advocating against it. From 1985 to 1996 he served as Amnesty International’s representative in Washington, speaking to Congress on behalf of political prisoners of the world’s repressive regimes. It was like working on a fire engine, he says, rushing to the scene of atrocities to stop them.

“I had many conferences with foreign ministers of other governments that resulted in political prisoners being released or executions being halted,” he says, “things I know on my deathbed I’ll say, ‘Wow, this was really something.’”

It was satisfying work. But slowly the urge to address the deep roots of violence grew more insistent. O’Dea recalls a conversation he had shortly after he left Amnesty. There was a need, he said, to examine the “deeper story” of the suffering of individuals and cultures that had been on the losing side of history.

“Unless we deal with that,” he recalls saying, “any demagogue, any fascist, any terrorist will be able to stir up those things that lie in the psyche of history. And there are deep, unhealed wounds we carry through the historical process.”

In April 2003, O’Dea came to the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) as its executive director. The 33-year old IONS is perhaps the preeminent organization attempting to wed science and spirituality with the goal of creating a more compassionate world. Its combination of idealism, erudition and the solid stuff of this world seems a good fit for O’Dea.

WLT spoke with O’Dea on a spring afternoon at IONS’ modernist hilltop campus outside Petaluma. He is tall, fit and imposing, with steel-gray hair, narrow hazel eyes and a trim, composed mouth that gives him an appraising expression. Intellectual and unsentimental, he might have been a Jesuit in another era, animated by a distant, philosophical kind of love for humankind rather than warmth and affection.

And yet it’s clear O’Dea regards this moment in history, with its cresting fundamentalism and disparate wars, as a critical time as much as it is a time bursting with opportunities. O’Dea alluded to conclusions of quantum physics—that seemingly unrelated subatomic particles can affect each others’ behavior—as a starting point for changing the way humans think about the world.

“It seems to be in the map of consciousness, when we talk about quantum entanglement, that in fact we are a part of each other,” O’Dea said. “It’s in our hearts to grow together, to find each other. What we’re talking about is an evolutionary shift to a more heart-centered global civilization.”

For O’Dea, coming to see the human potential for connectedness was a long process. His experiences in Turkey and Beirut might have left him without hope had he halted his search there. But as part of a project on restorative justice at the Seva Foundation, the social justice organization co-founded by Ram Dass, O’Dea, at that time Seva’s executive director, witnessed a reconciliation between a former Nazi and a child of Holocaust survivors. It knocked him on his heels and eventually propelled him to IONS.

“I saw vividly that human beings have a capacity we largely ignore,” he says, “to face truth, to heal, to recover.”

And yet he knows firsthand from his work with Amnesty that the world at large is skeptical about this capacity. “Somehow you’re the lightweight in the room if you’re talking about our capacity to heal, to forgive, to express love, to dialog with the Other,” he said. “And that has to change. We have to see that the hope of our future lies in these capacities which are great assets.”

The Institute Of Noetic Sciences was founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had an epiphany on his return trip from the moon. A NASA whiz kid trained in science and engineering, Mitchell was unprepared for the “almost palpable” presence of divinity he experienced in the space capsule as it approached Earth. His desire to reconcile his transcendent experience with the empirical training that got him there was summed up in IONS’ mission to explore the interface of science and spirituality.

In the last 33 years, IONS has applied scientific processes to subjects considered off-limits to science—things like intuition, love, epiphany and healing. Marilyn Schlitz, the Institute’s vice president of research and education, calls it an attempt to “broaden science to include our subjectivity.”

“We’re trying to use our data both to explore the noetic—that subjective, qualitative dimension of our interiority—and to reveal the inadequacies of the dominant scientific model that rules out the subjective,” she says.

The research was always undertaken “within the framework of creating a sustainable civilization,” says founder Mitchell. “But now we’re saying we’ve got to really step up this notion of personal, cultural and societal transformation.”

This is the work that O’Dea finds so thrilling. “The Institute reads this historical moment as a time to try to present a frontier of science that’s breathtaking in its implications,” he says, “and needs to be adopted in our schools, be the basis of our community organizing, the new politique that is based in models of consciousness, not models of ideological or religious competition.”

Citing the popularity of mind-body healing, an area of research in which IONS has led, O’Dea and others see medicine as providing a good foothold for widespread cultural change. The Institute is also planning an audacious dive into the hows and wherefores of personal transformation. As part of an eight-year research project, IONS is mapping transformation—what ignites it, how people respond, what makes it stick in people’s lives.

“The Institute of Noetic Sciences is about exploring the frontiers of consciousness to advance individual, social and global transformation,” says O’Dea, quoting from the mission statement. “And that transformation may seem idealistic, given the existential reality.

“But maybe I’m one person and one life in what I have seen, being at the end of a knife to being in a city that was bombed to spending 10 years waking up every day to torture and murder and mayhem—and still, I believe that the greatest transformation humans have ever thought about is potentially very close, and that science has a dramatic role to play in informing us about our true capacity. The arrow of evolution wants to take us there.”

Traci Hukill is a freelance writer based in Monterey, CA.

To participate in IONS’ study on how to cultivate and sustain personal transformation, visit transformationsurvey.com.