In 2009 I published a little book of parables which was titled Augustus Finds Serenity.

In the introduction to the book, I outlined the reason why I had sought to use the medium of metaphor and parable to outline the concepts that I thought were useful in helping people live more fulfilled lives.

I started my career as an engineer and the principal tools I used were built on mathematics and physics. Rational, quantitative science has delivered many benefits to the world. Yet there is still much of what is important to me that is not illuminated by the scientific method.

Why is this so?

In some ways we are still locked in to the “Age of Reason” prompted by the discoveries of Newton and Descartes. The tremendous advances of western societies initiated by scientific and mathematical discoveries in the seventeenth century led many to believe that the world could only be understood by the application of such rationalism. However by the twentieth century, many (including some very influential scientists) were beginning to doubt the efficacy of this approach in coming to grips with the world.

In most pre-modern cultures there were two recognised ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos.

Logos (reason) was essential in engaging the material world. It was needed in ordering our societies, manufacturing our produce and dealing with the physical environment.

Mythos (myth) helped us to come to a more informed understanding of human nature and our place in the world. The stories of gods and heroes shared over generations the practical knowledge of dealing with the human condition. Whether it was Jason seeking the Golden Fleece or Hercules enduring his Twelve Labours, people understood that these weren’t stories of real people but pointers to how we might live our lives. Moreover they provided a fundamental understanding of the human condition that was beyond the ken of Logos.

These two ways of knowing are complementary. We rely on both to help us come to grips with the human predicament. If we accept logos but reject mythos we will be logical, competent people but lacking in spirituality and a deeper understanding of human nature. If we reject logos and accept only mythos we might live a rich internal life but will be grossly ineffective in dealing with the world around us.

Darryl Reanney, in his lovely little book The Music of the Mind quotes the famous lines from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding.(Little Gidding is a poem by Eliot that explores themes of renewal, spirituality, and the intersection of time and eternity. The poem is part of Eliot’s Four Quartets and was published in 1942. It’s named after a 17th-century Anglican monastery in Huntingdonshire.)

Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Reanney points out ‘that most people react to this poem in a special way; they sense that it is true without being able to see why it is true. Mythos can tap well-springs of knowing that logos cannot and vice versa.

As well, much of the wisdom that we arrive at through the means of mythos is also paradoxical when viewed through the lens of logos.

For example:

He who loses his life shall find it.

The best way to learn something is to teach it.

All I give to another I give to myself.

Reanney called the realisations we get from such a process “another way of knowing”.

Just as we hand down the realisations we get from logos in formulae, theorems and equations, the realisations that we get from mythos we hand down as parables, metaphors and stories. In this way mythos underpins our spirituality, and also indeed, in many ways, our understanding of human psychology.

What we must guard against in this process of course, is not to take the stories as literal. We need to see them as reflecting ‘truths’ but not being true in a factual way. This is the trap of fundamentalism. Indeed a Buddhist sage once pointed out,

When the sage points to the moon, the fool sees the finger!

You will note that though many of the parables and metaphors propagated by the various religious traditions are different, many of the underlying truths are the same. This realisation prompted Aldous Huxley to write his famous book The Perennial Philosophy. He demonstrated that many of the precepts that Christians believe are unique to their religion are in fact ubiquitous in other belief systems. This is a singular demonstration of the ego that wants to promote how special we are by seeking sources of differentiation whereas at the core of our being we are so similar!

But there can be no denying that parables and metaphors are powerful ways of teaching essential truths. This, then, is the reason for the use of parables in my little book. The world’s wisdom traditions have all used the same vehicle.

Now all this suggests that our consciousness is more complicated than most of us imagine.

As I sit here in my office I can see the small tree in the front yard. It is a favourite place for the bull-finches to sit before they venture down to the bird bath. Naming, as we have seen in other essays I have written, is part of the process of duality. It is differentiating something of a particular class (tree) which is separate from me. It is not a very accurate description and unless I use qualifiers you will not appreciate much about this tree, whether it is large or small, a native or exotic species, with dense or sparse foliage etc. I can tell you it is a small avocado tree with half-grown fruit and that will add a few details to your picture, but it takes far more than this to accurately describe the tree.

Before there was a conscious observer with the gift of language it wouldn’t have been a tree at all but just another feature of the landscape undifferentiated from hills or stones or waterfalls. Consciousness is the tool for differentiation – without consciousness there are no “things”. To put it in a more traditional way, without a subject, there can be no objects.

Before we had conscious observers there was no history. However with the evolution of humankind we had the capacity to pass on the events known by past generations to the present and future generations, firstly by word of mouth and then later by written transmission. Then applying our growing scientific aptitude in geology, archaeology and so on, we were able to reconstruct some of our past and add it to the growing body of knowledge. But before the advent of consciousness there was no awareness of time passing and therefore there could be no history.(This as we will see later is an erroneous notion of time. For the time being – no pun intended -I will stick with this conventional representation of time.)

What about the laws of physics? Is it possible that they could exist without consciousness?

Firstly, I suppose that they would be meaningless without something that could “know” them. Indeed the laws of physics are largely written out in mathematical form. Mathematics is really a special language with its own rules of grammar and its own distinctive characters – but a language no less! Only those who have learnt this language can really appreciate the laws. The laws of physics are useful to us because they are predictive – they answer the question “If this happens then the response will be ….”. Consequently they operate in time and as we saw time has only meaning to those who are conscious.

And because Mathematics (just as French or German) is a language, all physics is done by analogy, since we do not know (like my tree above) the “thing-in-itself.”

The German Philosopher, Martin Heidegger taught:

Language is the house of being and in its abode Man lives!

The Physicist,Federico Faggin had this to say about language:

A language is a system of symbols necessary for communication among conscious entities. This takes place through a dialogue, ie the repetition of communication cycles consisting of a phase in which inner meaning is converted into outer symbols followed by a second phase in which outer symbols are converted into inner meaning.

Whilst this is a tremendously useful process, it does have its limitations. As intimated earlier language can only provide us with a representative interpretation of the world. This is readily apparent when we rely on the language of mathematics and physical laws to come to our understanding of reality.

In astrophysics apparently there are four equations which describe the basic movement of stars. These are difficult equations to solve simultaneously and generally scientists make do with approximations. In order to supposedly encourage his students, one university professor urged his students to persevere in solving the equations because, “After all, the star has to solve them.” But of course the star doesn’t have to solve them at all. The mathematics is merely our attempt to describe and predict what happens to the star. It allows us to make some discernible pattern from the nature of physical reality. We do it by trying to understand the patterns and reactions between such things as temperature, pressure, gravity, velocity etc. These factors in our equations that we define and measure help us to come to an understanding of some representation of reality, without really knowing the reality itself.

It is interesting to speculate on the so-called Laws of Physics. Why do we call these strange entities laws? The earliest use of this term in English in this sense reportedly dates back to the seventeenth century when systematic science began to take off. The first two examples traced by the Oxford English Dictionary are dated from 1665 – one from the Transactions of the Royal Society and one from Boyle – and they relate to a universe set and maintained in motion by the command of God. The ‘laws of nature’ notes the Dictionary were viewed by those who first used the term in this sense as ‘commands imposed by the Deity upon matter’.

Descartes opined, “Even if God had created more worlds, there could have been none in which these laws were not observed.”

It is not obvious to me why, if God existed, he would want his universe to behave everywhere uniformly. It would seem to me, instead, something that we humans desire. Once I’d worked out the angle I needed to hit the red ball with the white ball in a certain position to make it go into the pocket of the billiard table I’d like to think that the event was reproducible. Once I had worked out the way to predict where Jupiter would be in its orbit for a particular time, I would like to think that I could apply the same reasoning to other planets.

One set of the Laws of Physics is called the conservation laws – the conservation of mass/energy, the conservation of momentum. Perhaps there is a law on the conservation of intellectual effort. Once we have solved a problem of a particular class we should be able to solve similar problems with little extra effort! Maybe that’s what the laws of physics do for us!

Perhaps we can extrapolate from them into other worldly situations. For example Newton’s First Law of Motion states that in order for the motion of an object to change, a force must act upon it, a concept generally called inertia. It is easy to deduce from this law how my shoes will remain dull and dusty unless I polish them, how my carrots will remain raw unless I cook them, how I will remain fat unless I diet and so on, [and why your teenage son’s room is never likely to be tidy (but perhaps that’s got more to do with the second law of thermodynamics that says it is inevitable that order in the universe runs down in to randomness over time)]!

But I digress. Every act of observation that I make changes, however imperceptibly, my observed world. Even in viewing my avocado tree I had to intercept the light radiating from it. A tiny bit of that impinged on my retina and then was not available for any other purpose. More grossly, to see it well I had to lean forward at my desk obscuring the view for anyone who happened to be behind me.

Before I went on my bike ride yesterday, I tested the air pressure in my tyres with a pressure gauge. In doing this I released a tiny bit of air from each tube which slightly reduced the pressure I was trying to measure. If I go to measure the voltage at a certain point in an electrical circuit I necessarily increase the impedance in the circuit.

Observing is never a completely passive act. Anaïs Nin was surely right when she wrote:

We don’t see things the way they are, we see things the way we are.

We each have a particular worldview and we try to make our perception of the world “fit” this world view. In  psychology this is called “confirmation bias”.

Thomas S Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions showed us how difficult it is for people (even reputable scientists) to modify their worldviews on the basis of evidence. It seems to be a part of human nature that we will discount evidence that is contrary to our hypotheses and exaggerate that evidence that supports them!

My state of mind serves to compartmentalise the universe about me. If I am starving things seem suddenly to appear in the categories of edible and inedible. If I am being pursued the landscape dissolves into avenues of escape and places of entrapment.

So in many ways we are in the act of observation modifying the world around us. This of course is seen at its most dramatic at the level of the quanta. In quantum mechanics, (as I described in my most recent essay) many phenomena only exist in probabilistic terms until they are observed. Then it appears that the act of observation collapses the probability function into an actual event (not just an array of possibilities). In this way observation can in fact be seen as creating reality. One might then conjecture whether there can be any reality without consciousness?

So let me get to the point. I will be provocative now. I find it hard to believe that anything can exist at all unless it is somehow in a field of consciousness. Using my references above, there are no trees, no history, no laws of physics even that could have meaningful existence without consciousness. Consciousness is eternal – it is not time dependant, just as it is not matter dependant. Consciousness is the stuff of the universe and we are fortunate to have access to some part of it. The act of human observation is then, in my belief, part of the process of creation.

If you doubt that our consciousness can create landscapes and people and natural phenomena, what about your dreams? Do they not create an environment similar to that you confront when awake? The consciousness that abides in you is but an atom of the collective consciousness. In sleep you are dissociated from the collective consciousness and are aware of your own small creation. Awake, you are reunited with the All and share the universe that we collectively conjure up. Your dreams are the dreams of Atman; in your awakening you share the dream of Brahman.

As I have related in previous essays, I have always been fascinated by time. It has often seemed to me that if I could understand time, I might come closer to understanding reality.

Turning to our scientists and philosophers does not easily clarify the matter. Newton, Kant and Leibniz all had varying opinions of the real nature of time.

To begin with, we have come to understand that our universe seems to be embedded in four dimensions – that is the three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time. I keep asking myself, “Why is time differentiated like this from the dimensions of space?”

One answer may be that we believe we are so short of time – that we perceive that we live a life of finite magnitude and then are overtaken by death. Time then seems to come with our feelings of mortality embedded in it. The other dimensions of the universe don’t threaten us in this way. People complain far more about running out of time – hardly anyone complains about running out of space!

In the Sanskrit epic, the Bhagavad Ghita, the hero Arjuna confronts the god Krishna not as a creator, but as a destroyer.

“Tell me who you are?” he asks Krishna.

And the god replies:

I am come as time, the waster of the peoples
Ready for the hour that ripens to their ruin.

This sense of running out of time creates in us a terrible sense of time pressing us with a feeling of “be quick before it’s too late.”

As the Persian poet, Omar Khyam wrote:

One moment in annihilation’s waste
One moment of the well of life to taste
The stars are setting and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing. Oh make haste!

The human species has evolved to measure space directly but time indirectly. Why should time be different in this way?

We seem to need motion to define time. Initially we measured our lives in days which reflected the earth turning on its axis and years which reflected the earth’s passage around the sun. Then we invented clocks which counted the swings of a pendulum. Today’s most accurate timepieces rely on the movement of atoms and subatomic particles – but nevertheless movement. Scientists say that before the Big Bang there was no time. And it seems that if the universe were to run down, allowing the second law of thermodynamics to eventually result in a cold and motionless universe, there would be no time either.

The thirteenth century theologian and mystic, St Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles:

God does not move at all, and so cannot be measured by time; neither does He exist “before or after” or no longer exist after having existed, nor can any succession be found in Him … but has the whole of his existence simultaneously.

We use one word, “infinity”, to describe that which encompasses all space and another word, “eternity”, to describe that which encompasses all time. But the sages tell us that both these concepts are a product of dualism and that really all of infinity exists at every point of space and that eternity is completely present at every point in time.

The German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher and mystic, Meister Eckhart proclaimed:

The Now-moment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which the last man will disappear, and the Now-moment in which I am speaking are all one in God, in whom there is only one Now. Look! The person who lives in the light of God is conscious neither of time past nor of time to come but only of one eternity.

These concepts are not exclusively Christian but seem embedded in most of the major belief systems. For example one could say that the primary aim of all Buddhist practice is simply to awaken to the Eternal Present.

The ninth century master of Zen Buddhism, Huang Po said:

Begingless time and the present moment are the same …You have only to understand that time has no real existence.

In D T Suzuki’s translation of the Gandavyhu Sutra ( which is the last chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the most influential scriptures in East Asian Buddhism, written some 500 years after the death of Buddha) he writes:

In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present or future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense.

In the Awakening of Faith, which is a text of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism it is written that:

The realisation that Mind is Eternal is called Final Enlightenment.

The Indian, Ramana Maharshi, who was a twentieth century Vedantic sage stated:

Apart from us, where is time and where is space? If we are bodies, we are involved in time and space, but are we? We are one and identical Now, then, forever, here and there and everywhere. Therefore we, timeless and spaceless Beings, alone are … What I say is that the Self is here and now and alone.

So then is time just another device of dualism which differentiates one from another using a temporal illusion? I think so. I stated before in another blog that two of the primary devices of dualism are ego and time. I believe that is true.

Albert Einstein had this to say in capturing the essence of dualism:

A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

There is no other time but Now. All our remembrances of the past are current constructions that we experience in this moment. All our prognostications about the future are also experienced in the timeless, eternal Now.

I have referenced many poets, mystics and sages in this blog. It is time now to provide a reference for the more rational of my readers!

Louis De Broglie, the French Physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics had this to say:

In spacetime, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given en bloc …. Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of spacetime which to him appear as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting spacetime exist prior to his knowledge of them.

Our notion of time is confused by the common assumption about the “arrow of time”. We have come to believe that time is uni-directional, moving from the past to the present and thence to the future. In his book, The Intelligent Universe, Fred Hoyle, the eminent English astronomer, showed that electromagnetic waves can be reversed in time.

He asks:

Is it conceivable that the possibility of a reversed time-sense future to past, is an exception, pretty well the only exception to this general rule of natural parsimony (the arrow of time)?

He then gives his own answer:

I have long considered that the answer to this question must surely be no, and I have for long puzzled about what the consequence of such an answer might be.

Hoyle’s dilemma would have been solved had he understood that time is everywhere, all at once!

The unenlightened might ask then, “Is here and now all there is?” as though “here and now” were really of little significance. But the enlightened might respond, “Here and now is All!” and there can be nothing of greater significance.

And now we can see why William Blake might have written:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wildflower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

Or perhaps we might understand the sentiments of the Buddhist sage, the Zen Master Dogen:

It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact it stays where it is. This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an incorrect idea, for since one sees it only as passing, one cannot understand that it just stays as it is.

Perhaps I should finish with a q thought from the Australian scientist Darryl Reanney who I quoted earlier. Reanney was a distinguished contributor to both microbiology and biochemistry. Reanney was an extraordinary author being able to meld the essence of science, mysticism and spirituality together in cogent form.

He ended his book The Music of the Mind with this statement:

A simple crystal of insight tells us how the world is built:
Knowing unites in eternity what matter creates in time.

Knowing, consciousness and time all together framing the paradox of reality!