In my previous essay which I titled “Such is Life” I explained the basic cosmogony of Hindus and others is that the world and all in it were created by a dream of Brhman.
The sceptics will probably laugh that I should pay any respect at all to such a fanciful concept. My critics will insist that I should pay more credence to science. But when it comes to science the best it seems to offer to explain creation is the “Big Bang Theory” which in my eyes is even more fanciful than Brahman’s dream!
Physics was revolutionised in the twentieth century by quantum physics. Quantum physics brought uncertainty into science. At the level of the quantum nothing is certain and quantum phenomena are subjected to probability.
Of Scientists and Mystics
But if you look at the writings of the Quantum Physicists it is readily apparent that many of them were what we might call “mystics”.
They knew that they had discovered something that stood outside of the material explanation of the universe. It is probably fair to say that their discoveries showed that the universe could not be described in purely physical terms. Indeed they showed that there were always facets of the physical universe that were just beyond physical understanding. Try as we may, there were parameters that would always remain uncertain.
Ken Wilber, the American philosopher and explorer of transpersonal psychology, has used Plato’s famous analogy of the Cave to illustrate the respective roles of physics and mysticism. Wilber writes:
To use Plato’s analogy of the Cave: physics gives us a detailed picture of the shadows in the Cave (relative truth), whereas mysticism gives us a direct introduction to the Light beyond the Cave (absolute truth). Study the shadows all you want, you still won’t have light.
While not strictly a Quantum Physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington (whose work involved further elaboration of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity) also utilised Plato’s Cave when explaining the conclusion he had come to with respect to the limitations of physics:
The frank realisation that physical science is dealing with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
Mysticism (as I view it) might be defined as a belief that at the very centre of all of us there is a common Spirit which we all share so that essentially we All are as One”. What’s more that Oneness is the ultimate reality, but not wanting to recognise this this, our agent of separation, our egos, create a shared illusion which we identify as the physical world.
If this sounds implausible to you, here is what Nobel Prize winning, Quantum Physicist, Erwin Schrodinger had to say:
It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice that you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sentient beings. ……………….
Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence but it is, in a certain sense the whole. This is the sacred, mystic formula which is so clear: ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am above and below, I am this whole world.’(Emphasis added.)
In the mystic traditions, when we go beyond or transcend the self (indeed the separateness that the ego creates), we discover a universal Spirit, that is, as Wilber asserts; “infinite and all-pervading, eternal and unchanging”.
According to this interpretation of the world, we live our lives in a delusion created by our egoic selves. It is by any description a truncated life where we are mainly unaware of our inherently divine nature.
As Einstein explained:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.
One of the most influential of the Quantum Physicists was the American, David Bohm. Bohm, decried the reductionist approach which was to try and understand the physical world by dividing it into smaller and smaller segments.
He asserted:
Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.
In this statement we can see a very Buddhist like approach to the world, encouraging us to think in a holistic way and leaning toward a non-dual approach, counter to the viewpoint of traditional physics.
And further
:
Aside from what I feel to be the intrinsic interest of questions that are so fundamental and deep, I would, in this connection, call attention to the general problem of fragmentation of human consciousness. It is proposed that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and ‘broken up’ into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent. When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own ‘Ego’ against those of the others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will defend this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on. What I am proposing here is that man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view is problematic. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.
Erwin Schrödinger was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist whose ground-breaking wave equation changed the face of quantum theory. Schrödinger believed in a unified consciousness and was inspired by the ancient Indian philosophy/religion of Vedanta. He wrote a number of books, but in his final book My View of the World he attempted to reconcile his scientific and philosophical viewpoints. To give you an example of his mysticism, he wrote in this book:
Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi*, this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’.
(*Normally translated from the Sanskrit as “Thou art that”.)
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering? And not merely ‘someday’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Wolfgang Pauli was another pioneer of Quantum Physics and also a Nobel Laureate. Although he seems to have been a little more pragmatic than some of his peers developing this new bewildering field of physics, he also seemed to connect this mysterious world that he had helped unearth with mysticism.
He wrote:
It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.
And also:
A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. I have referred to him and his famous Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in previous essays. His thinking was certainly influenced by Eastern mystical philosophy.
Heisenberg wrote:
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
Compare this to one of the fundamental tenets of Taoism:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
Like his peers he saw the physical world as something less tangible than traditional physics would allow.
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
And like many of them, he understood that primary dualism was a problem.
In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.
There are many more such quotes that I could instance which indicate our most famous physicists, those who arguably understood the physical world best, also understood that their science could at best provide only a partial explanation of the universe.
Ken Wilber wrote:
Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavour, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality. It does not for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all of that, with the Whole.
While Wilber is probably right in this regard, it is hard not to believe that these explorers of the physical universe understood more than anyone that mysticism could help us provide a more complete explanation of the “way things are” than science acting alone.
More than this, these ground breaking scientists seem generally to agree that the essential “stuff” of the universe is more than just matter. They largely concur with the mystics that lying behind the façade of matter is Mind, not just the individual minds of each of us but a Universal Mind which each of us share in part in our own, paltry, unique way.
The Dream of Brahman
I believe I have established the truth that many of our most esteemed scientists concurred with me that reality cannot be illuminated by science alone.
Let me share with you an allegorical description of another way of considering the universe.
In the beginning there was Brahman. In the end, which might have been perceived differently but was essentially still the same, there was Brahman too. And all there was, is and ever will be is Brahman or manifestations of Brahman.
Brahman thought, “Here I am – everything, all-encompassing, all-pervasive, with no end and nothing unknown. I am indeed the One. And how fortunate it is to be in such a privileged position. How easily it might have been otherwise. What would it have been like to have been otherwise? How would it be, what might I feel, if I was a mere part of this universe, rather than the Universe.”
And at such an aberrant time, and in order to quell his curiosity, Brahman dreamed the Universe. This was a perverse thing to do, because Brahman knew he was everything, that there was nothing other than Brahman. But being All was a heavy burden. In a moment when he was imagining what it might be like to put aside his Oneness, he dreamed the Universe. In this great creative act he projected something outside himself. In this marvellous alchemy all at once the stars, the constellations and all the bodies of the firmament came to be. This was an outcome of nothing more than the blink of Brahman’s eye – instantaneous, and the outcome of a marvellous thought experiment.
And out of his omniscience this thought placed sentient beings into the universe. They evolved into human beings who occupied some of the illusion of space. In his dream Brahman forgot that he was Brahman and identified with these separate bits of his consciousness in order to know what it was like to be separate. And of course, the human beings not being aware that they were all in their essence Brahman, believed that they were all separate and thus somehow special. Thus ego was born. And now, as a result, all these little bits of Brahman were competing with each other to assert their superiority.
And all this time Brahman dreamed his dream knowing that essentially “All is One” but trying to get to understand what it might be like if that was not the case. And as he slept the fragments of himself that he had set free were up to all sorts of mischief. They invented racism, tribalism, nationalism, religious intolerance and all forms of competition where individuals tried to assert their specialness and their primacy.
They found all sorts of ways to accentuate those minor discrepancies they had which somehow seemed to make them seem different from their fellows. And from this arose misery and war and all manner of dissatisfaction and suffering.
One such being, carrying a shard of the consciousness emanating from Brahman, sat on the rocks by the sea, trying to understand what life, his life in particular, was all about. Rhythmically the waves crashed on the rough shore. The crashing of the waves on to the hard surface caused the spray to fly up and spread over the adjoining rocks. He watched the spray depositing on the surface of the basalt, condensing into droplets that slowly ran down its face only to rejoin the sea.
He looked out on the mighty ocean which extended all the way to the horizon, which from his vantage point, might for all intents and purposes, be infinite. And there was so much of the ocean that was unknown to him. He could only see the surface where the waves formed and surged. What depths lay beneath he could not tell.
The droplet of water running down the rock face seemed to be liberated and free but it was inexorably under the influence of gravity running back to the ocean. Even if it had been flung further afield it would evaporate in the sun and join the transition of other such droplt individuals in the clouds and then through precipitation fall onto the land and run off into the ocean or even fall directly into the ocean.
In some very direct way, the droplet was always part of the ocean. It came from the ocean, was temporarily separated and then returned. If it were conscious, the thinker wondered, would the drop believe it was a separate entity? If its tumultuous birth as a droplet caused from a wave being dashed on the rocks had obliterated its memory of the past, so that it did not know where it came from, it would undoubtedly believe it led a separate, independent existence. From his vantage point it was evident to the observer that all the droplets emanated from the ocean and would inevitably return to the ocean. In this way its notion of separation was largely an illusion.
Than the thinker wondered, what about himself? He also had the perception of separation and independence. Would it appear different from a vantage point where his whole existence could be observed in relation to all other beings? What if the consciousness that seemed to pervade him, and from what he could tell was present in other human beings was but a spark of the eternal consciousness? What if his conscious existence as a separate entity was merely an illusion in the same manner as it appeared to the water droplet? Thus his perception of separateness was but a temporary illusion also. Then (just as in the conversion of Saul) the “scales fell from his eyes” and he knew at once that he was also Brahman.
Brahman had awoken from his dream and in that instant his thought experiment was complete and the was reconciled with the universe he had created. The notion of separateness was just an illusion. All conscious individuals were inexorably linked with Brahman just as each water droplet is inexorably linked with the sea!
So then there is only One and it is all and every manifestation of matter, and time, and separateness is but an illusion emanating from the playfulness of Brahman who is the fundamental source of everything and to which everything must inevitably return.
Conclusion
Our world and in turn our existence is mysterious.
Classical scientists were both reductionist and deterministic. They believed that causation was materially determined and our understanding of the world would be enhanced by a continuous process of dividing it into smaller and smaller physical components.
The development of Quantum Physics (as I have outlined above) has led us to believe that we can never understand the world through direct observation alone.’
That wonderful writer on the world’s religions, Karen Armstrong, argues that true understanding requires embracing both Logos (reason -direst knowledge) and Mythos (beliefs, parables and metaphors –indirect knowledge).
Many of us are confused by Mythos. Mythos is not the Truth but a pointer to the Truth.
This is well demonstrated by the Buddhist saying that:
When the sage points to the moon, the fool merely sees the finger!
Thus my little parable about The Dream of Brahman is, of course, not literally true but a pointer to the Truth.
Those immersed in Logos thus see Mythos as fanciful and unbelievable. And, unfortunately, those immersed in Mythos often come to believe that the stories of Mythos, its metaphors and fables, are indeed literally true. This is the source of fundamentalism.
But I believe that there is much to take heart from this pragmatic merging of the practical and the intuitive. I hope that this will help every individual reconcile their place in the universe, not as a separate entity struggling to assert its independence but as a component of the eternal Whole!