I’ve been working on a paper/article covering the convergence of modern science and spirituality, and I wanted to share some of the very interesting conclusions that I have developed. Stay with me in this and I think you’ll see why there’s a lot to be grateful for! This is a gratitude blog, after all.
First, a little background. In science, for the last 200 years the dominant belief underlying the description of the universe has been materialism – the universe’s basic structure is matter and everything that exists has developed from matter blindly following natural laws of evolution. This includes human consciousness and our inner sense of self, which are seen as illusions created when the brain gets complex enough. Under this paradigm when we die, we die and no part of our sense of self survives.
Now, I agree with the scientists that just because we don’t like this, it’s not a good enough reason to say it’s not true. But there are real problems with the materialist view that remain ignored or unsolved.
The most well known of these problems comes from quantum mechanics, and it’s called the observer effect. In quantum theory, which has been verified many, many times, the smallest parts of matter, and also light, only exist as waves of probabilities until someone looks. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but it describes the problem. If consciousness is an accidental result of a complex brain (an “epiphenomenon”) then why is it a central causative agent in physics? Recent experiments have made this problem worse as experimenters have shown quantum effects on larger and larger pieces of matter, such as big carbon “buckyballs.”
Another challenge to materialism has been the results of the Global Consciousness Project, started at Princeton University. Originated by Robert Jahn and carried on by Roger Nelson (whom I had the pleasure of meeting when he spoke at Unity Village in 2005) this project uses a Random Event Generator that is based on a quantum event. In essence, a computer looks at the REG at regular intervals to see if the event, which is completely random, has happened. It’s like a quantum coin flip happening many times per second, and over time should be equally heads and tails.
Experiments with individuals, and later with group meditations, showed that they could cause significant deviations in the patterns! This again seriously challenged the materialist view because the mind, being nonmaterial, should not be able to affect the material world. But the biggest surprise came when Dr Nelson hooked up 40 REGs from around the world to the Princeton computer and left them running.
Most of the time the results flatlined at the expected 50-50 level. But on September 6, 1997 there was a massive shift off the 50-50 level as the machines all around the world diverged from normal. An astonished Dr Nelson searched for some cause and realized that at that time over 1 billion people around the world were watching the funeral of Princess Diana.
That was the first documented hard scientific evidence of the existence of a mass consciousness! The project is still running and has correlated with other world events since then, but none as dramatic as that first one.
All of these issues have led to real challenges to the materialist view, typified by a Discover magazine article a few years ago titled “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” In it, the author quoted eminent physicist John Wheeler as saying, “We are not bystanders on the cosmic stage, but shapers and creators living in a participatory universe.” The article also quoted Stanford physicist Andre Linde as saying, “I can’t imagine a theory of everything that ignores consciousness.”
Enter the “new” theory, which can be simply described as asserting that the material universe is made from consciousness, not the other way around. It turns out that it’s not really new; these issues have bothered some scientists for the last century. For example, Max Planck, the father of quantum theory has said, “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.”
So why did these concerns get ignored and materialism remain dominant? Well, as Winston Churchill once commented, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.” And so it was in physics. Materialism worked well as long as you didn’t ask pesky questions like, “What does this mean about the nature of reality?”
Today the challenges to materialism from scientists are becoming hard to ignore. I quoted Wheeler and Linde above. Theoretical physicist Amit Goswami has written “The Self Aware Universe” which I consider the best complete analysis of physics, consciousness and spirituality. Recently eminent medical doctor and researcher Robert Lanza and astronomer Bob Berman published “Biocentrism” which again makes the strong case that the universe is created by consciousness.
What does this have to do with spirituality? Only everything. After all, if as Max Planck said, behind everything is Mind, are we not talking about God? This is not the primitive god described in some of the ancient world religions, but something much friendlier. Back in 2005 I was in a workshop with physicist Fred Alan Wolf and he said, “The ideas of a bug-squashing god and a clockwork (materialist) universe are both the products of deranged minds!”
That’s perhaps a little stronger than I would put it, but in essence quite true. Both concepts are ready to be disposed of in the dustbin of history.
If consciousness is the foundation of reality, and we are conscious because we are the creation or expression of consciousness, what does that say about us? Since consciousness seems to be unitary (singular, not plural) then we can say that we are all connected, we are all one. God is Mind; we are mind. This conclusion is hard to ignore.
I got a good laugh out of Lanza and Berman’s book, “Biocentrism”, which they wrote from an explicitly non-spiritual, agnostic perspective. In the forward they apologized for the fact that some of their conclusions sounded like Eastern spirituality; they said they didn’t mean it but they couldn’t help it. That’s where the science took them!
It’s not just Eastern thought; the Western “New Thought” religions of Unity, Religious Science and Christian Science have always taught that God is Mind and that we are expressions of that Mind. Here we definitely see science and spirituality explicitly converging.
But let’s not leave the major world religions out. Willis Harmon, in his extraordinary book “Global Mind Change” (Ken Wilbur calls it “superb!”) makes an important point. The world religions have two aspects, the best known, of course, being their external forms of doctrine and rituals which are all quite different.
However, he points out that they all have within them a subset of contemplative, mystical traditions based on transcendent experiences in mind, and they are very similar. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, the Sufi poet Rumi and the Buddha seem to describe the same reality. This has been called “the perennial philosophy” after the 1945 book of the same name by Aldous Huxley.
In his powerful 1906 New Thought book, “The Science of Getting Rich” Wallace Wattles summarizes the first part of his teachings this way: “There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates and fills the interspaces of the Universe. A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.”
Or, as Charles Fillmore, a co-founder of Unity wrote in 1936, “Divine Mind is the one and only reality..Everything in the universe had its origin in Mind… The idea is the most important factor in every act…Men formulate thoughts and thoughts move the world.”
We can see from these quotes that both science and the “perennial” spirituality are converging on a description of reality that centers on consciousness, of Mind. Now what does this say about life after death? After all, the materialists would tell us that we’re out of luck. Is there evidence for a different view?
It turns out that the experiences of people in transcendent meditative experiences and people who have had out-of-body or near-death experiences are very similar. Although most of these experiences can not be adequately described by those that experience them, the sense of oneness, joy and overwhelming love is common. One common result is the loss of the fear of death.
My wife was for 7 years or so a nursing case manager for hospice. She was present when many of her patients died, and she saw that often the closer to death they got, the less fear and the more peace they experienced. It was if at the end they were half in and half out of their body and what they were touching was peaceful, joyful and loving.
That’s probably why the hospice workers, contrary to what you might assume, actually grow less fearful of death the more they see. Regardless of their religious background, they see that in some fundamental way it’s a joyful homecoming.
If we are point expressions of Mind, then from Mind we come and to Mind we go. Or in more scientific terms, if we are individualized expressions of unitary Consciousness, then we return to oneness with Consciousness. As Willis Harman puts it, “Basically, death appears less as an extinction than as awakening to where one is all along.” He called it a shifting of our awareness from the physical plane to something higher.
Perhaps that’s why the Buddha denied being a teacher, a master, a seer or anything else like that. When asked, “Well, then, what are you?” he simply said, “I am awake.”
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As an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity and is located at: http://www.superrelativity.org
This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious.
Thank you for this excellent article. You’ve done a great job of summarizing these new areas of scientific inquiry, how they challenge the old scientific paradigms, and how they might affect all of us in the future. I’ve recommended this article and linked to it in the post “Old Questions, New Answers” (http://www.dugmugg.com/?p=352) on my blog.
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