A forum for seekers of spiritual awakening through self-transcendence, irrespective of spiritual tradition, religious or non-religious background or affiliation.
.... Our goal is to walk with true spiritual seekers, and to provide encouragement along the path as these modern spiritual pilgrims quest for the holy modern grail --- a new state of consciousness and being ....
"Buddhism has all the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."
Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is
lame. . . . Religion without science is blind."
In the book "The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama," editor Arthur Zajonc makes the following comments on the ways in which the so-called "New Physics" has turned classical understandings of the cosmos and reality on their ears:
"During the three centuries that established classical physics and cosmology," Zajonc observes, "the mechanistic and materialistic character of physical theory came to dominate Western thinking even outside these areas. Increasingly, philosophy came under the powerful sway of science through such thinkers as Descartes, Kant and Locke. The life sciences, longing for comparable precision, sought out a similar path to development to that of physics. Genetics, evolution, and cellular biology displaced natural history and whole-organism biology. The mind itself, traditionally understood as the expression of the spirit, gradually became part of the mechanistic universe as well. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the physics of the seventeenth century had successfully conquered the adjacent areas of science and was already encroaching on that of the mind. A single mechanistic paradigm and its associated materialistic metaphysics came to dominate Western thinking."
However, he notes:
"With the opening of the twentieth century, the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity would make incomparable demands on our conception of the universe. We are still struggling to grasp their full implications. They challenge the simple mechanistic accounts of matter and the cosmos we inherited from earlier centuries, replacing them with accounts that shun such pictures. In addition, both quantum theory and relativity grant a new prominence to the observer. It is hard to overestimate the significance of these developments. The ramifications of twentieth-century discoveries for physics and cosmology have been enormous, changing our very notions of space and time, the ultimate nature of matter, and the evolution of the universe. They have also begun to affect philosophical discussions in significant ways."
For his part, the Dalai Lama notes that, "In Buddhism in general, and particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, the basic attitude is that you should remain skeptical at the beginning. This skeptical attitude automatically brings up questions. Questions bring clearer answers, or investigation. Therefore, Mahayana Buddhist thinking relies more on investigation rather than on faith. . . (An) attitude that is very, very helpful in communicating with scientists."
"There are two kinds of wrong views," the Dalai Lama notes. "One exaggerates what is actually there, superimposing onto a thing a property of existence or status that is not there. The other denies what is actually there. So both absolutism and nihilism are seen as wrong views. Thus, even in ethical discourse, a correct understanding of reality is very much emphasized. Therefore, scientific findings are very helpful to Buddhist thinking."
The three-part video discussion, below, (like the dialogue between scientists and the Dalai Lama in 'The New Physics and Cosmology') examines the areas where "the new physics" described by Zajonc seemingly converge with traditional Buddhist teachings about emptiness, Oneness and the nature of 'reality.'
"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
-- Max Planck --
"Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."
-- Albert Einstein --
The Dalai Lama and the late cosmologist, Carl Sagan
"When I speak with open-minded scientists and philosophers of science," the Dalai Lama observes in his book "The Universe in a Single Atom," "it is clear that they have a deeply nuanced understanding of science and a recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge. At the same time, there are many people, both scientists and non-scientists, who appear to believe that all aspects of reality must and will fall within the scope of science. The assumption is made that, as society progresses, science will continually reveal the falsehoods of our beliefs - particularly religious beliefs - so that an enlightened secular society can eventually emerge."
"In this view," he continues, "science is perceived as having disproved many of the claims of religion such as the existence of God, grace, and the eternal soul. And within this conceptual framework, anything that is not proven or affirmed by science is somehow either false or insignificant. Such views are effectively philosophical assumptions that reflect their holders' metaphysical prejudices. Just as we must avoid dogmatism in science, we must ensure that spirituality is free from the same limitations."
"Clearly," he concludes, "this (scientific) paradigm does not and cannot exhaust all aspects of reality, in particular the nature of human existence. In addition to the objective world of matter, which science is masterful at exploring, there exists the subjective world of feelings, emotions, thoughts, and the values and spiritual aspirations based on them."
"If we treat this realm as though it had no constitutive role in our understanding of reality," he cautions, "we lose the richness of our own existence and our understanding cannot be comprehensive. Reality," he points out, "including our own existence, is so much more complex than objective scientific materialism allows."
Indeed, as many scholars working at the leading edge of science - particularly those scientists investigating the phenomenon of consciousness itself - have pointed out, there seems to be a convergence of physics with the metaphysics of the world's great non-dualistic wisdom traditions (particulary with Buddhism and the Advaita Vedanta). The following videos serve as a wonderful introduction to this seemingly strange intersection of the worlds of cutting-edge science with traditional Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics.
Knowing scientifically, that the space within the atom is 99.999999999999% empty, that what "matter" does exist therein is more probabilistic than "real," and that even such probabilistic particles are fundamentally entangled with every other particle in the universe is bound to redefine our collective worldviews going forward.
The intriguing aspect of the "truths' discovered by modern Western scientific inquiry and technology, is that all of these principles were largely anticipated by millennia old Eastern wisdom insights. The question then becomes, one supposes, whether ancient traditions, like Buddhism, can (as Einstein observed) serve as the basis for building a truly "cosmic religion for the future." For, in these days, the future seems more imperiled than ever by outdated religious traditions and understandings - traditions and understandings that seem to conflict evermore directly with mankind's burgeoining scientific understanding.
"The great problem of the modern age is to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it, and which are alike opposed to common sense."
-- Ernest Renan --
("Life of Jesus")
Whilst a religious belief that contradicts or ignores the realities science has uncovered regarding man, the world and the cosmos quickly becomes absurd, a sole reliance on science to inform us of these realities says nothing about our inner condition, or how we chart a path to contentment and a truly sustainable relationship with the Earth.
In a concise three-part video, below, Peter Russell, a fellow scholar at The Institute of Noetic Science, critiques the blind Western reliance on science and technology to shape our worldview, describing it as being arid and sterile in terms of providing satisfactory values and meaning.
What science has been unable to explain, as yet, he notes (as many others have) is the phenomenon of consciousness, a matter that has been the subject of Eastern inquiry for millenia. Developing our understanding and experience of 'consciousness' and 'being', he proposes, will move us along a path to sustainable happiness and inner peace."
"Western science has been remarkably successful in explaining the world around us," Russsell points out, "but it hasn't given us meaning. The world it describes is a dry, material world without any real purpose. And science has also given us an abundance of technologies which we use to satisfy many of our needs and desires. But, again, it hasn't given us values. It doesn't tell us the best way to use this incredible knowledge and power. It also hasn't really helped us to develop inwardly. If anything, it has reinforced our sense of self-centeredness."
"We are probably more full of ourselves today than we've ever been," he notes, observing that what we really need "is an integration of our scientific understanding of the world with the wisdom that is held in the world's spiritual traditions."
"The origins of consciousness may remain a mystery," he concedes, "but how to awaken our consciousness, how to free ourselves from disguised attitudes and values, to discover who and what we really are, is not a mystery. That is not a mystery. That is something that has been explored by spiritual teachers from around the world, people who have gone deep within their own minds and discovered the true nature of consciousness, and from that how to live with joy and love in their hearts. And that is what we need today. We need to rediscover that wisdom for ourselves."
In the attached set of videos, cosmologist and integral thinker, Brian Swimme, teaches a cosmic history lesson which puts into perspective where we are today, given our newfound knowledge of the universe, our world and life itself. He then suggests a "new story" that will help us to evolve as an integral component of life on Earth, and to face the existential problems we have created for ourselves by adhering to "old stories" that no longer fulfill their purpose.
In the first video ("A New Story"), Swimme points out that the cultural stories that developed over the past thousands of years, useful as they were, are no longer really helpful in light of the knowledge that we now have about our history, origins and progress. It is time, he notes, for us to develop a "new story" that will serve us well, given the new information that we have about ourselves.
Video Two situates us where we are in the vast cosmological scheme of things, while Videos Three through Five trace the origin of the universe, the advent of life on earth, and our development as a species. For those well versed in these areas, these videos may be superfluous. Yet, Video Six ("The Present Moment") is a must-see video which puts the existential challenges we face - particularly the man-made phenomena of mass species extinction - into a perspective that is valuable for anyone seeking solutions to the problems created by our common humanity. Videos Seven through Ten, in turn, suggest how we can develop and enhance lifestyles and attitudes that are viable given the dynamic changes and challenges that we are living through.
Rene Descarte's famous dictum, "cognito ergo sum" ('I think, therefore, I am'), while logical and apparently self-evident on its face, may be wholly wrong. Voices as varied as spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Werner Hesienberg (who first developed the eponymous 'Uncertainty Principle' that forms an integral component of the quantum theory), have critiqued Descartes on precisely this conclusion. "I am, therefore, I think," would perhaps be a more accurate summary for Tolle, who has identified "thinking without awareness" as the main problem of humanity.
For his part, Heisenberg in "Physics and Philosophy:The Revolution in Modern Science," observes that Descartes' distinction between internal reality (res cogitans) and outer reality (res extensa) skewed science so that it looked almost wholly to the external, a viewpoint that cannot be sustained given the role of the observer in quantum mechanics.
"(T)he basis of the philosophy of Descartes is radically different from that of the ancient Greek philosophers," Heisenberg notes. "Here the starting point is not a fundamental principle or substance, but the attempt of a fundamental knowledge. And Descartes realizes that what we know about our mind is more certain than what we know about the outer world. But already his starting point with the "triangle" God-World-I simplifies in a dangerous way for further reasoning."
"The division between matter and mind or between soul and body, which had started in Plato's philosophy, is now complete. God is separated both from the I and from the world. God in fact is raised so high above the world and men that He finally appears in the philosophy of Descartes only as a common point of reference that establishes the relation between the I and the world."
"If one uses the the fundamental concepts of Descartes at all," Heisenberg continues, "it is essential that God is in the world and in the I and it is also essential that the I cannot be really separated from the world. Of course Descartes knew the indisputable necessity of the connection, but philosophy and natural science in the following period developed on on the basis of the polarity between the "res cogitans" and "res extensa." The influence of the Cartesian division on human thought in the following centuries can hardly be overestimated, but it is just in this division which we have to criticize later from the development of physics in our time."
[Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy," pp. 52-53]
"If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein had in understanding the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory," Heisenberg remarks, "one can trace the roots of this difficulty to the Cartesian partition. This partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality."
Perhaps, a better summary, and one that both Tolle and Heisenberg might accept is "observare ergo sum" - "I observe, therefore, I am" - for it is the observer that finally determines the outcome in quantum mechanics, coalescing one reality out of an infinite number of possibilities, and for Tolle it is the witnessing Presence of the observer that stymies the ego and makes his or her world whole.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
For a detailed introduction to the work of Heisenberg and the development of the quantum theory, particularly as it relates to consciousness, the cosmos and our Being, see the related post ("God, Quantum Physics and Cosmology: A Video Compilation"), which is available, below.
An interesting and informative video introduction to quantum physics, cosmolgy, the "new physics" and their relationship to "God" has been put together by UNFFwildcard on YouTube ( "God and Cosmology I").
Very detailed, the video series (embedded below) is nonetheless a concise explanation of the "new physics" and the problems and possibilities that quantum theory presents for our understanding of the cosmos, consciousness and, perhaps, an omnipresent God that pervades and supports the universe.
Video for God and Cosmology - Part 4 is available for viewing on YouTube by following this link.
The following talk on quantum physics and consciousness by Dr. Amit Goswami (of "What The Bleep Do We Know?" fame) gives the viewer an insightful look into the behind-the-scenes operation of quantum phenomena in forming the world we see, a world formation that is driven by our consciousness in Dr. Goswami's view. It is in quantum mechanics, says Dr . Goswami, that science first encounters the free will of the individual, an intriguing proposition that brings science full circle to its metaphysical roots in natural philosophy.
"Consciousness is the Ground of Being," says Goswami, and our present is conditioned by all the past effects - our "memories of 'who I am'' - which are all reflected in what he calls the "mirror of our memories." In realizing that "the observer is the observed," he notes, we gain true "wisdom."
"But there really is no free lunch," Goswami warns, "we have to meditate and reach these non-ordinary states of consciousness before we become the creator of our own reality." Yet, this is not necessarily such a great leap, he observes. "As this is (becoming) clear," he notes, "we are getting a new wave, a new generation of enthusiastic investigators who are ready to take this leap."
After we take such a leap, "instead of playing in a small pond," says Goswami, "we play in the bigger arena of the world itself. We become a citizen of the universe."
Among scientists, as polymath lecturer, Alan Wallace points out, it is still generally considered "impolite" to bring up the question of what 'consciousness' is. Consciousness, it seems, is still very much the 800-pound gorilla in the science lab or classroom.
Yet, as Wallace observes, William James (one of the fathers of modern psychology), in speaking on the subject of consciousness more than a century ago, remarked: "That which we ignore recedes from our experienced sense of reality." This is, of course, a danger that Wallace made clear in the first half of his extensive lecture (embedded below) highlighting the problem that consciousness still presents for the mainstream of Western science.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Wallace observes, we have more information about the 'Big Bang' and the nano-seconds thereafter than we do of the origins of human consciousness. "There are no scientific means," Wallace notes, "of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in anything, including you or me right now."
It is odd, Wallace points out, that we have virtually no knowledge of something which is so intimate to each of us. "Right now," he observes, "if one were were to ask cutting-edge people, that is people working in the cognitive neurosciences . . . what are the necessary and sufficient causes for the origination of consciousness in a human being . . . the answer would be: 'We don't know.'"
Further, Wallace asks, what is the nature of matter? This, of course, is perhaps the great question - with 'some' solutions (matter is essentially the same as energy, Einstein demonstrated) - of the new physics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century with the framing of both relativity and quantum theory. "There was something called twentieth-century physics," Wallace notes, "that makes the chunks of 'stuff' get very, very ethereal."
Wallace points out that "by the time you have the 'measurement problem' in quantum mechanics that makes at least suspect the very existence of quantum phenomenon before they are measured - in which the role of measurement remains a mystery in understanding the significance (and) the nature of the quantum realm - by the time you are speaking about probability waves that are being measured and that somehow collapse into actual particles . . . then matter has somehow become more ethereal than was assumed in the nineteenth century."
"You can," he notes, "(even) raise the question: 'Is there any energy in the nature of empty space itself?'" And the answer is, he points out, likely 'yes.' There is, he points out, a growing scientific consensus that the universe emerged from a quantum fluctuation and is imbued with 'dark energy' and 'information' about the original fluctuation that we cannot even directly observe, although the mathematics indicates that it is there.
"As soon of you speak of the universe of space, time, mass, (and) energy as an emergent property arising out of a hidden (and) underlying dimension of information, the question of consciousness at least can be raised," Wallace observes. Information being, at least on its surface, a matter of the mind, the whole question of consciousness should therefore, according to Wallace, be once again kicked back into the scientific debate of just what the universe is. And yet, as he points out again, any scientific agreement that consciousness itself is a valid subject for scientific inquiry is still somehow lacking.
"Instead of simply assuming that the mind emerges from matter, Wallace concludes, it is possible now . . . and scientifically credible to consider the possibility that space-time and mass-energy all emerge from an underlying dimension of reality that may transcend the very duality of mind and matter."
And, it goes without saying, of course, that this very notion of a non-dual implicate order Wallace speaks of is the essential teaching of all the great Eastern (as well as some Western) wisdom traditions, a point that has not been lost on some of the leading-edge voices - scientific as well as spiritual - who, like Wallace, have probed the rarified and ethereal area where science and Eastern wisdom traditions seem to converge.
In an insightful and encompassing lecture on the competing visions of our origins - metaphysical and physical, spiritual and scientific, Eastern and Western - Alan Wallace, a polymath Buddhist practitioner and trained physicist, traces how the origin of the scientific method has evolved to generally exclude anything that smacks of 'subjectivity' - and, most specifically, the phenomenon of consciousness.
The scientific stricture on limiting its studies to the strictly 'objective' became a very limiting bottleneck in the study of 'reality' with the rise of relativity and quantum theory at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, its historical preclusion of anything that that might be construed as 'subjectivity' became more and more untenable as one delved further into the role that the 'observer' (or consciousness) plays in the microcosmic world of atomic sub-particles
The brilliant Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, in his book, "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science," highlights (and questions) the extent to which 'subjectivity' was precluded from 'classical physics,' a prejudice that was carried over, with mixed results, into the so-called 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum theory.
In "Physics and Philosophy," at page 29, Heisenberg writes:
"In classical physics science started from the belief - or should one say from the illusion? - that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves. This is actually possible to a large extent. We know that the city of London exists whether we see it or not. It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves. Its success has led to the general idea of an objective description of the world. Objectivity has become the first criterion for the value of any scientific result. Does the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory still comply with this ideal? One may perhaps say that quantum theory corresponds to this ideal as far as possible."
"This division," between 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity,' Heisenberg observes, "is arbitrary and historically a direct consequence of our scientific method; the use of the classical concepts is finally a consequence of the general way of human thinking."
But is this really a consequence of "the general way of human thinking," as Heisenberg posits? In the first part of a compelling, if lengthy, lecture, Wallace traces how the strictures against 'subjectivity' arose because the scientific method, ironically, arose out of traditional Christian theological and metaphysical assumptions and worldviews.
"From the time of Copernicus, right on through Kepler, Galileo, Newton and so forth," Wallace observes, "science as we have come to know it has been overwhelmingly extrospective in its orientation (and) its perspective. To understand the nature of reality scientists have looked outwards."
"There are very good reasons (that scientists look outwards), and a lot of them are based in Christian theology," Wallace observes. "It's very important to bear in mind that a great majority of the founders of the scientific revolution were themselves devout Christians. A number of them were theologians, such as Newton himself. And so there were very deep metaphysical underpinnings to the scientific revolution. It was not by any means a revolt against religion," Wallace declares, "but rather an expression of it for many of its participants."
"The scientific aspiration from the time certainly of Galileo on through Newton and for quite some time after that," says Wallace, "was to know the objective world from a God's eye perspective, free of the limitations of human subjectivity."
"Prior to the scientific revolution, prior to the Protestant Reformation," he notes, "there was Christian theology and there was together with that a fairly strong . . . contemplative ideal (and) discipline founded by people like Augustine and the earlier Desert Fathers - and later right on through the Medieval period - that was largely introspective in nature. . . . But with the Protestant Reformation there was this movement outwards, and so one finds no strong inward contemplative tradition, so to speak . . . in the new Protestant Reformation."
Wallace notes that "the Protestant Reformation . . . did have a contemplative mode to it, an active mode of inquiry into 'reality,' but (one) which stood instead of contemplative practice - sitting quietly, introspecting (and) going within one's own soul - (and) looked outwards."
"I think you can virtually regard scientific research, or scientific . . . methodology, as being like the contemplative counterpart for Christian Protestant theology," Wallace observes.
The methodology of third-person 'objectivity' (a cornerstone of the modern scientific method), Wallace notes, was thus developed as a method to check that personal subjective biases were not clouding the way in which a 'God's-eye view' would actually look upon the 'reality' of the physical world.
This has been "extremely successful for opening up that facet of reality that lends itself to third person investigation, namely the physical world" Wallace observes. "The disadvantage of that is that it ignores - simply because it refuses to attend to scientifically - those facts of reality that do not lend themselves to that type of third person public scrutiny. What leaps to mind," he notes, "is the whole range of subjective phenomena."
"What happens," Wallace asks, "if your authorities for knowledge very intelligently and for a sustained period and in multiple ways attend to one aspect of reality, and in a very concerted way, scientifically speaking, ignores another aspect . . . (or) domain of reality?"
Wallace cites the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher William James, who, in his classic work, "The Principles of Psychology," observes that:
"The subjects adhered to become real subjects, attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man’s land, in the limbo “where footless fancies dwell.” . . . Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all . . . they are not even treated as appearances; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all."
And so, this quirk of the Eurocentric evolution of the scientific method excludes the radical 'subjectivity' of millennia of Eastern philosophical and psychological insights, thereby erecting a largely artificial interpretive barrier to understanding consciousness and the subtler aspects of 'matter' that are increasingly less amenable to Western interpretations as quantum theory and our understanding of it develops. A point that is well made by Wallace in the first part of his lecture.
For a number of years Dean Radin, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has been doing leading edge research regarding the boundaries of the mind-brain interface and chaos theory. His research, and that of his colleagues around the world, have melded their research regarding the influence of 'mind' on 'randomness' into the "Global Consciousness Project," a collective effort which explores whether the intentions or attention of large numbers of subjects have any statistical effect upon the results produced by random number generators.
Describing this interface of the scientific study of so-called 'paranormal phenomena' and the 'mind sciences,' Radin observes that the research being done through the project "all devolves back into the question of what is the role of mind in the physical world."
"From a Western science point of view there isn't much," he observes. But in describing his own work, and that of his colleagues, Radin notes that both the intention and attention of individuals do appear to have an effect in the wider environment. In describing the fascinating results coming in from the Global Consciousness Project, Radin notes that he and his colleagues have come to the startling conclusion that there is "a context where we can infer there is a mental concurrence going on, sometimes due only to attention."
"We don't know whether it is simply a lot of human minds that are somehow changing randomness, or whether this is a reflection of something bigger, something like a collective mind," Radin notes, "a collective mind which includes everything else including what we think of as matter and energy."
It may be, he posits, that "the same kind of organizing event that changes random events also changes our attention."
In a related video, Radin explores how the leading edge of Western scientific inquiries into consciousness seem to be converging on the same conclusions reached by millennia of Eastern inquiry into the nature of the mind.
"If you keep following out on Eastern lore," Radin observes, "you find things (at some point) of 'mystical union' with the entire universe. At that level, the report is - the reports across cultures and throughout history - that the universe is not the meaningless object that Western science says that it is. But, rather, that the universe is permeated with meaning and is saturated with consciousness."
"There is consciousness everywhere," Radin notes, "in which case, while the Western viewoint is that your mind, your awareness, is locked inside this structure (the brain), from the Eastern viewpoint this structure is the entire universe, and you can experience it like that."
"Western science has not quite gotten to the point yet where it is able to verify that that's the case," he notes, "but I think the signs are very clear that that is becoming an interesting question. And methods are being developed to take Western science and move it along this continuum to begin to verify in Western terms what the mystics have been talking about for thousands of years."
"God is in the macrocosm and in the microcosm." said Sri Ramakrishna, the great self-realized sage of late 19th-century India. In this all encompassing and prescient observation, Ramakrishna foreshadowed the struggle which scientists, philosophers and spiritual seekers alike are having in trying to understand and put into words the relationship between traditional notions of spirituality and consciousness with the findings of 'the new physics,' and the particular difficulty they have in describing the startling nature of the quantum theory, which says an act of conscious observation is necessary to 'determine' what happens at the smallest levels of 'matter.' (Indeed, it is difficult even to think or talk about 'matter' at such small levels, where the quantum physicist describes 'matter' as a probability wave, and the determination of 'matter' as the collapse of the probability wave function triggered by an act of conscious observation.)
In the video, embedded below, a host of 'new age' spiritual teachers and scientists explain why consciousness is a fundamental component - and, perhaps, the fundamental component - of the 'stuff' our universe is made out of.
Perhaps the most important of Einstein's many crucial contributions to 'the new physics' was to show that 'matter' and 'energy' are the same thing (the logical result of relativity theory and his famous e=mc2 equation). Now the great challenge, or holy grail of science, is to show how energy and consciousness itself act together in determining our physical 'reality,' a 'reality' which may not be as 'real' as we most commonly assume.
"There is no 'matter' as such," observes spiritual teacher, Wayne Dyer, quoting Max Planck, the forefather of quantum physics. "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."
"Matter seems like a good place to begin," notes medical doctor turned best-selling author and spiritual teacher, Deepak Chopra. "The solidity of the world seems totally indisputable. As a fixed thing that you can see and touch, your body is also reassuringly solid. But beginning with Einstein, modern physics has assured us that this solidity is a mirage."
"There is no 'matter' as such. All matter originates and
exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle
of an atom to vibration and holds this minute solar system
of the atom together. We must assume behind this force
the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This
mind is the matrix of all matter."
"It is the act of consciousness," says one commentator, "that actually creates the building blocks the universe is made of. I can't imagine a universe that exists without us, because it is the act of us observing the world around us that is creating, (that is) allowing us to create as we go, a 'participatory universe.'"
"We may never find the edge of our universe as we are looking to define what this universe looks like," he notes. "We many never find the smallest particle in the quantum world to see what this 'stuff 'is that we are made out of. And the reason is, because everywhere we look - everywhere that consciousness explores with the expectation that something will be there - that exploration, that act of looking (or) observation, is the act that creates something for us to see. We are actually building this universe as we go," he notes.
"To understand meditation and consciousness, we need to understand . . . about the physical universe," says Dr. John Hagelin in his introductory video on Transcendental Meditation, below. "Modern science over the past fifty years has probed deeper levels of physical reality. Modern science has explored more fundamental level(s) of nature's functioning."
"From the superficial level of macroscopic physics - the sensory objects that surround us - to the world of the molecule, and the atom, and the nucleus, and sub-nuclear natures of nature's functioning," he notes, "as modern physics has probed deeper level of nature's functioning it has revealed that more fundamental levels of nature are progressively more unified."
"The four forces of nature deep within the atomic nucleus become three, and two, and ultimately one unified field of all the laws of nature," he observes.
"From this fundamental perspective of modern science," Hagelin notes, "meditation properly understood and properly practiced is a systematic technique to experience deeper levels of mind, more subtle levels of thought, exploring deeper levels of human intelligence. And these deeper levels of human intelligence . . . correspond to the direct experience of deeper levels of intelligence in nature. This inward flow of the awareness quickly culminates in the direct experience of the unified field. . . . In this simplest settled state of human awareness - the most maximally expanded state of human consciousness - this is the meditative state."
"This experience of the unified field constitutes a fourth major state of human consciousness, distinct from waking, dreaming and deep sleep. And this fourth state of consciousness has the most profound implications for health, for brain development, (and) for virtually every area of human life."
Contemplatives and yogis have explored this fourth level of expanded human consciousness for thousands of years. Now with modern technology, brain scientists are confirming the claims of seasoned meditators and enlightened teachers like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation program.
"Brain studies of expert meditators while in 'peak states' have become increasingly sophisticated and better controlled," note a group of researchers whose findings on the effects of distinct, yet related Therevadan Buddhist meditation practices were generally confirmative of Dr. Hagelin's claims.
Much of the research on meditation and the brain involves Buddhist or TM practitioners. A wide selection of the available scientific literature is available on the WiseBrain.org website, an organization founded by Dr. Rick Hanson Ph.D., a neuropsychologist and affiliate faculty member of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and Rick Mendius, M.D., a neurologist, author and teacher, formerly on the teaching faculties of UCLA, Oregon Health Sciences University, and Stanford University.
In re-introducing his theory of the "Implicate Order" in his later work, "Unfolding Meaning," theoretical physicist and spiritual iconoclast, David Bohm highlighed the differences between the two leading strains of what may be called the 'New Physics' - relativity theory and quantum mechanics - two physical theories that still challenge scientists to synthesize their findings in a true "theory of everything."
"Relativity requires strict continuity, strict determinism and strict locality. In quantum mechanics you have to say the opposite - discontinuity, non-determinism and non-locality. The physical concepts of these two theories have not been brought together, although people are working out equations and methods of doing it mathematically. But the physical meaning has never been made clear."
[David Bohm, "Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue," p. 8.]
Of course, written in 1985, this description of the state of theoretical physics continues to hold true today. Although there have been a host of contender theories, like 'string theory' and the 'multiverse theory,' none has been accepted as closing the theoretical gap between relativity and quantum theory.
There has not yet emerged a consolidated, unified theory that accounts for both the macrocosmic effects of relativity theory and the microcosmic effects of quantum mechanics. Moreover, and one cannot but speculate that this is a result of not being able to reconcile relativity and quantum theory, science has not yet been able to formulate a unified theory that explains how the force of gravity is related to the electro-magnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces in a true "Unifiied Theory, or 'theory of everything."
David Bohm (right) in dialogue with spiritual teacher, Jiddu
Krishnamurti, with whom Bohm collaborated for many years.
Bohm suggests the problem is that we are looking at the phenomena of an "explicate order" only, and that beneath this explicate order" there exists an "Implicate Order" that truly forms the fabric of our 'reality.' "If you want to look at relativity and quantum theory as being together coherently," he observes, "we may ask a new kind of question. Instead of asking how the theories differ, let's ask what they have in common."
"What is common to both is [the] unbroken wholeness of the universe. Each has this wholeness in a different way," Bohm notes, "yet if wholeness is their common factor, that's perhaps the best place to start."
And, indeed it is from this "unbroken wholeness" of the universe, that many subsequent researchers and theoriststs have started. But with the continuing failure of such de riguere and exotic attempts as "string theory" and "multiverse theories" to reconcile these two great branches of modern physics - and, even more so, to give us a plausible "picture" of what the substratum of our glimpsed "reality" is - Bohm's notion of an as-yet unobservable "Implicate Order" remains convincing.
Indeed, it is echoed in the words of Bernard d'Espagnat, the French physicist and winner of the prestigious 2009 Templeton Prize (for research at the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion), who "developed the idea that the reality revealed by science offers only a 'veiled' view of an underlying reality that science cannot access, and that the scientific view must take its place alongside the reality revealed by art, spirituality, and other forms of human inquiry."
"Quantum mechanics allows what d'Espagnat calls 'weak objectivity,'" writes David Lindley in ScienceNow, "in that it predicts probabilities of observable phenomena in an indisputable way. But the inherent uncertainty of quantum measurements means that it is impossible to infer an unambiguous description of 'reality as it really is.'" D'Espagnat "has proposed that behind measured phenomena exists what he calls a 'veiled reality, that genuinely exists, independently of us, even though we lack the ability to fully describe it."
"D'Espagnat's writings on quantum mechanics lay out with great clarity the genuine puzzles that quantum mechanics presents," says Jeffrey Bub, of the University of Maryland. "But," Lindley notes, there is a certain skepticism "about finding common ground among notions of reality from art, science, and spirituality." As Bub remarked to Lindley, just because there's something strange about the physical world that quantum mechanics isn't telling you, "it doesn't follow that those gaps can be filled with poetry."
And yet, in close resemblance to Occam's famous 'razor,' a certain "elegance" of theory is one factor that science seems to favour in selecting one scientific paradigm for another. And in that "elegance" there appears what may almost be thought of as "the art of science." In suggesting his notion of what constitutes an "Implicate Order" out of which our 'reality' is unfolded (or what d'Espagnat would qualify as falling behind the "veil") Bohm's technical language and vision have an artistic feeling and dynamism of their own:
" . . . (T)he movement of enfolding and unfolding is ultimately the primary reality, and . . . the objects, entities, forms, and so on, which appear in this movement are secondary.
. . . (Q)unatum theory shows that the so-called particles constituting matter are also waves similar to those of light. One can, in principle, make holographs using beams of electrons, protons, and so on, as well as sound waves -which has been done. The point is that all mathematical laws of the quantum theory that apply to these waves, and therfore all matter, can be seen to describe just such a movement in which there is a continual enfoldment of the whole into each region, along with the unfoldment of each region into the whole again. Although this may take many particular forms - some known and others not yet known - this movement is universal as far as we know. I'll call this univeral movement of enfoldment and unfoldment 'the holomovement.'"
"The proposal is that the holomovement is the basic reality, at least as far as we are able to go, and that all entities, objects[and] forms, as ordinarily seem, are relatively stable, independent and autonomous features of the holomovement, much as the vortex is such a feature of the flowing movement of a fluid. The basic order of this movement is therefore enfoldment and unfoldment. So we're looking at the universe in terms of a new order, which I'll call the enfolded order, or the implicate order."
"The word 'implicate' means to enfold - in Latin, to fold inward. In the implicate order, everything is folded into everything."
To Bohm, it is in this intricate and artistic dance of the enfolding and unfolding that our 'reality' takes form, seemingly separate yet entangled with, and an integral part of, the unseen and underlying "implicate order." It is in this dance, perhaps, that one finds expression of the largely unnoticed artistic side of physical reality. And it is the "unknown" or perhaps the "unknowability" of our most basic realities that draws us to try and interpret this dance for ourselves.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Basil Hiley, Emeritus Professor of Physics in Birbeck College, Univerity of London;
a colleague of David Bohm, on Bohm's Implicate Order and Quantum Physics.
For the atheist, the seeming absurdity of the phenomena of 'quantum entanglement' likely raises for-now unanswerable questions; for the agnostic it must give wavering pause and cause him or her to suspect (once again) that something larger is going on in or beneath the universe; for the 'spiritual but not religious' it is likely to be a confirmation that there is a Wholeness or Unity to our 'reality' that is radically different from 'traditional' Western portrayals of what "God" is and how "He" operates. For the latter, an understanding of the basics of quantum entanglement will confirm that the representation of the 'Old Testament' God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is just that - an artistic 'representation' that was, more or less, coerced from Michaelangelo. It suggests, in fact, that we live in a physically, spiritually and psychologically "Entangled Universe."
Quantum entanglement is just one of many aspects of quantum theory that cannot be understood or 'pictured' very well, perhaps most so by those who are capable of 'best' understanding it. Fundamentally, it means that 'things' (experimentally, 'particles') that were once part of a single entity or system somehow remain connected thereafter; and if one makes an 'observation' that determines the properties of one 'part' of the former entity or system, the other part will instantaneously exhibit the opposite but equal property.
"Quantum entanglement is a property of the quantum mechanical state of a system containing two or more objects, where the objects that make up the system are linked in such a way that the quantum state of any of them cannot be adequately described without full mention of the others, even if the individual objects are spatially separated."
(Source: Wikipedia, "quantum entanglement.")
In simpler (and more illustrative) terms, when two particles come together and form a 'system,' thereafter "they behave like one object, but remain two separate objects. It is as if they now sit on the same teeter-totter seesaw. No matter how long the seesaw is, even if it is one million miles long, if one end is down the other end must be up, and this happens instantly." (Source: Simple English Wikipedia, "quantum entanglement.")
The "EPR paradox" (Einstein/Podulsky/Rosen) unsuccessfully
challenged the notion of quantum entanglement. (Wikipedia)
This 'radical' interconectivity at a distance (or 'non-locality,' as it is called in physics) gave Einstein fits. Although it did not cause the great scientist to pull out his iconic hair, he spent much of his latter career trying to disprove the phenomena. Along with his colleagues (Podulsky and Rosenstein) he proposed the "EPR Paradox" thought experiment in order to challenge the notion of entanglement, as according to relativity theory nothing travels faster than light; the speed of light (the c in Einstein's famous E=mc2 formula) being the notional "speed limit" of the universe.
Einstein was unsuccessful, however, and Scottish physicist John Bell showed in 'Bell's Theorem' that such 'super-liminal' (or "faster than light") connectivity must exist. This was proved, experimentally, in 1972; and thereafter the notion that one particle or 'thing' over 'here' is an integral part of a system with some 'thing' over 'there' - even when over 'there' is a distance of thousands or millions of light years - fell away, and it began to seem that Western physics and cosmology was looking more and more like the cosmology and 'physics' of Eastern wisdom traditions.
(See article on Einstein's spiritual or 'religious' beliefs.)
The ideas of Buddhist 'dependent origination' (that everything that 'is' arises from interrelated and prior causes or phenomena) and "Indra's Many-Jewelled Net" from Hinduism (in which every bit of the universe is connected to and holographically "reflects" every other bit of matter) are beginning to look more and more like how Western physics was beginning to model the universe.
Perhaps this is just speculative and coincidental, but many informed scientists suspect that it is not. In any event, it has given great impetus to people who would classify themselves as 'spiritual but not religious' to question further the traditional notions of outwardly religious beliefs and dogma. More and more, it appears that the scientific and inner religious or spiritual traditions, as well as Western psychology are beginning to meld and overlap. Perhaps, they are destined to merge, as the following video on "Where Science and Buddhism Meet" suggests.
Or, as Gary Zukav observed in his now classic book, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters,," (at page 31), "(P)hysics is (becoming) the study of the structure of consciousness."
“. . . If there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For what we know is incomplete and what we prophesy is incomplete. But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will be done away with.. . . Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully . . ."
David Bohm, the renowned physical theorist - who was at once the contemporary, colleague and friend of both Einstein and the renowned spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti - proposed that there is a for-now imperceivable "Implicate Order" within which our perceivable universe (the "Explicate Order") unfolds. "I would say," he wrote in his treatise, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order," "that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment. . . ."
Over and over, Bohm observes that the basic problem we have in understanding ourselves, each other, and the basic nature of our 'reality' - particularly in the West, which is still in the grips of a more-or-less 'classical' Newtonian worldview - is that we tend to break up or "fragment" the universe, the world, mankind, and even our thoughts, in order to 'understand' them, rather than trying to obtain a holistic vision of what we perceive.
"Being guided by this view," he observes, "man then acts in such a way as to try and break himself and the world up so that all seems to correspond to this way of thinking. He therefore obtains an apparent proof of his fragmentary self-world-view." (This echoes Einstein's comments about the commonly held world-view that he described as a sort of cosmic "optical delusion of [man's] consciousness.") It is a world-view that has grave implications, according to Bohm:
"Fragmentation is . . . an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways of thinking that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity. It leads therefore to a general tendency to break up things in an irrelevant and inappropriate way according to how we think. And so it is evidently and inherently destructive. . . .
When man thinks of himself in this fragmentary way, he will inevitably tend to see himself first - his own person, his own group - he can't seriously think of himself as internally related to the whole of mankind and therefore to all other people. Even if he does try to put mankind first, he will perhaps think of nature as something different to be exploited to satisfy whatever desires he may have at the moment. Similarly he will think body and mind are independent actualities. . . . Physically this is not conducive to over-all health which means wholeness, and mentally, not to sanity which also has a similar meaning."
In a five-part 1989 interview (hosted on SeekerAfterTruth.com) that was filmed at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Bohm lucidly - given his vast knowledge, wide yet cohesive interests, and keen intellect - holds forth on a wide range of interrelated topics. These include the relationship of the quantum and relativity theories to a holistic spiritual or metaphysical view of our 'reality,' the interconnectedness of all 'things' (including humankind) in a 'Wholeness,' the conflict between Western and Eastern worldviews, and the underlying 'deep roots' of the world's looming environmental problems - problems which stem from our treating world resources as separate "fragments" instead of the interrelated parts of a larger whole.
The "must-see" Bohm interviews capture one of the great minds, as well as great spiritual seekers, of the past 100 years at the height of his understanding of the "inter-relatedness" of all 'things' in the universe and our tendency to perceptively and conceptually break 'everything,' including (perhaps most importantly) our human interactions into 'fragmentary,' unrelated pieces.
In the rising awareness of and interest in the transcendental - not just in the world's great wisdom traditions, but in science, religious institutions and our culture generally - perhaps the growing acceptance of (and acknowledgment by) the Catholic Church of the truth revealed by leading-edge science is one of the most promising signs that physics, metaphysics and psychology are at last coming to a common understanding (albeit in different terminology) that there is a single, transcendental Unity that undergirds our perceptions and conceptions of "reality."
In a post several years ago, we reported how the head of the Vatican Observatory acknowledged the 'Big Bang Theory' as the most likely explanation of the Creation, a position overwhelmingly more enlightened than that held by fundamentalist Christians, particularly so-called 'mainstream' fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant sects in the United States, that insist on the "literal truth" of the Bible, despite its inherent contradictions and C.S. Lewis' reported observation: "If we are going to talk about the Bible, let's all agree that it's a work intended for grown-ups, or not have the discussion at all."
Now, in an address on January 6, 2011, Pope Benedict (as reported by Reuters), took an even bolder, if not further, step in the direction of reconciling the Catholic faith with the findings of reason and logic. As Reuters notes, "(t)he Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism -- the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world." Nevertheless, it still objects "to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation."
But, perhaps most importantly, given the long running controversy over teaching evolution as opposed to creationism in U.S. public schools (or now Intelligent Design, a "politically correct" and watered-down version of creationism), the Church opposes "using the Book of Genesis as a scientific text."
"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict reportedly told the crowd in St. Peter's Basilica on the appropriately chosen feast day of the Epiphany. "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God."
"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality," he continued, "we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth."
Pope Benedict's timely remarks celebrating the Epiphany (the anniversary that Christians celebrate as the day that the Three Magis worshipped the infant Jesus) are part of a larger effort to bring the Catholic faith into the scientifically-informed 21st century. Part of that effort has included rehabilitating the ex-communicated Gallileo, the father of modern physics, and the speech, below, that Pope Benedict gave to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' conference on "Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life."
Reading the text of the Pope's remarks, one can only be impressed by the 'transcendental times' we are living in; a time when what was once the most conservative of Western institutions is addressing the roadblocks that have blocked it from recognizing the same 'Unity' that physics and psychology are rapidly moving towards.
In part, these are the remarks that Pope Benedict conveyed to the Vatican's own conference into the origin of life in the universe, on another appropriately chosen date - All Saints' Eve - October 31, 2008:
In this context, questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence.
"In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. The same was
in the beginning with God." John 1:1-2
To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3).
To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."
