Quest Magazine

In the Beginning Is the Dance of Love

Printed in the Spring 2021 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Ravindra, Ravi, "In the Beginning Is the Dance of Love" Quest 109:2, pg 24-32

By Ravi Ravindra

ravi ravindra Our collective worldview, perhaps since the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, has led us to regard questions concerning the origin, development, measure, and meaning of the cosmos as pertaining almost exclusively to the domain of science and in particular to that of physics. For us moderns, cosmology is a branch of physics, a subject that since the sixteenth century has concerned itself with understanding the cosmos ultimately in terms of dead matter in motion in reaction to external and purposeless forces.

Natural theology, however, has a long history. At the beginning of modern science, the astronomer Johannes Kepler regarded himself as a priest of God in the temple of Nature. Isaac Newton viewed all his scientific work as a hymn of glory in praise of God.

A long and hard struggle was necessary to establish natural science as an independent mode of inquiry, free of the tyranny of theology and the church, which had been coupled with temporal power. Now, especially since the making of the atomic bomb in 1945, it is science that is associated with power; and a similar struggle may be necessary to rescue genuine spiritual inquiry from the tyranny of scientific rationality. Since Newton’s time, scientists have felt increasingly uneasy about mentioning God, at least in their scientific publications.

Contemplation of the heavens has always brought human beings to wonder about the meaning and purpose of the cosmos and their own existence. The heavens have always seemed to be the abode of the sacred, inspiring reflection and awe. However, a subtle shift has taken place in our attitudes owing to the rise and development of modern science. Let us take a familiar example, from Psalm 8:3–4:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

We too have contemplated the heavens and other things in the light of the latest scientific knowledge, but our attitudes, and our questions, are different. Today’s scientist is more likely to ask:

When I consider the heavens, the work of our equations,
the black holes and the white dwarfs, which we have ordained
what is God, that we are mindful of him?

Ideas and activities flourish and change in the context of a worldview, although worldviews themselves are permeable and elastic. Science is the major component of the present paradigm, and our intellectual discussions now take place with a background of a shared scientific rationality.

I do not have any new data to bring for consideration of whether the origin and evolution of the universe provides evidence for design. Nor do I believe that, collectively or individually, we need additional data to come to a proper sense of design (or absence of design) in the cosmos. Instead I propose to raise some issues around this question, organizing my discussion under the subheadings “Origin,” “Evolution,” “Universe,” “Evidence,” and “Design.”

Origin

The question of the origin of the universe is intimately connected with the understanding of time. It is practically impossible for the present-day Western mind to avoid thinking of time in linear terms. This notion has entered deeply into the structure of scientific thinking. Even when we think of nonlinear time, as we sometimes do in contemporary physics, we look at the nonclassical properties of time: its conjugate variables, how it works in other dimensions and spaces, and so on. Nonetheless, in physics we are always dealing with some dimension of time, and never the sort of situation when “time shall be no longer” (Revelation 10:6).

Of course, when we extrapolate along the dimension of time, we might run into a singularity, as we do for example in the equations dealing with gravitational collapse or the cosmological solutions leading to the big bang theory. There our notions of time go awry, and we need some very ingenious methods to get around these difficulties.

Even so, from the point of view of physical cosmologists, the questions concerning the beginning of the universe have to do entirely with smaller and smaller amounts of time from the initial event, when all this began. However many theoretical or practical difficulties we might encounter, we are trying to follow the time coordinate back to zero. We have theories now dealing with the state of the universe at time spans of the order of 10^-23 seconds after the absolute zero of time. There are theoretical reasons for believing that this may be the closest we can get to the absolute beginning along the time coordinate. If so, according to our present notions of time, it makes no sense to talk about time any closer to that beginning and certainly not prior to it.

Physical cosmologists are not searching for the beginning spoken of in mystical or mythical literature. When the opening line of Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” we are tempted to think that according to the Bible, the heaven and the earth were the first manifestations. To do so, however, is a mistake, as we see from the verses immediately following: the heavens were not created until the second day, and the earth not until the third; and the heavens, also called the “firmament,” were created in order to divide the waters above from the waters below. These waters, one should notice, existed before the existence of the heaven and the earth, which were said to have been created in the beginning. Perhaps this text is presenting us with two different kinds of heavens and two different kinds of earth. I shall not engage in biblical exegesis; I merely wish to suggest that we have here a notion of a beginning that is different from the scientific notion.

In such passages, we may be encountering difficulties with language that are endemic to all religious literature. But there is no reason for us to imagine that the scriptures are meant to be at our service and that they must be clear to us while we remain as we are. I imagine that, at the least, scriptures summon us to realities that we do not ordinarily perceive. The spiritual traditions universally agree that, for us to perceive these hidden realities, something in us needs to change. We cannot remain as we are and come to the Mystery. That change is called by many names: a change in the level of being, a change in consciousness, a deepening of faith, a new birth, the opening of the third eye, the true gnosis, and so on.

When the doors of perception are cleansed, one fundamental change that is said to occur concerns time: not only does one’s sense of duration change but, more importantly, one’s relationship with the passage of time alters radically.

Statements like “In the beginning was the Word” do not refer to ordinary time, on a coordinate axis, whose point of origin is the beginning. These statements carry weight and significance precisely because they were uttered and received in heightened states of awareness. Whenever these writings and symbols speak to anyone spiritually, it is because they carry a higher level of energy, and not primarily, or even at all, because of any logical clarity or agreement with our scientific notions of space and time.

This other kind of time—that of myth and mystical writing—is certainly not contradictory to our ordinary time. Nor is it, however, merely an extension of ordinary time in either direction of the coordinate: the beginning or the end. Just as the scriptural “beginning” is not the zero of the time coordinate, so mystical “eternity” is not an infinite extension of time. Thus what is everlasting is not necessarily eternal.

In a way, spiritual time appears to be orthogonal to scientific time: it lies in a dimension wholly independent of the domain of time, although it is able to intersect with time at any moment. Thus no manipulations of time or in time could lead to this orthogonal dimension of eternity, which speaks of mythic beginnings and endings.

Evolution

As long as there is time, there is change. That is how we understand and measure time; that is how we know that it exists and passes. It is only in this minimal physical sense, of state A changing into state B, that we speak about the evolution of the universe in physical cosmology. But there is an ordinary use of the word evolution of which we need to be careful: ordinarily one thinks of evolution as containing within it an idea of change in a desirable direction, so that the end product is at a level higher than its antecedents.

But it is very difficult to say how we should understand the concept of “level.” There are some connected notions, like those of development, growth, and progress. Something or someone who is at a higher level may have more being, more consciousness, or more wisdom, or may be able to perform more complicated tasks than one at a lower level. The idea of hierarchy is built into the notion of levels and of evolution. Furthermore, we specify which we view as higher or lower, or whether a process is degenerative, progressive, or static.

But cosmologists talk about physical change without attaching any notion of a hierarchy of being. Physical laws merely describe change in time. There is no place in them for intention, purpose, or evolution insofar as these contain the emotionally laden sense of progress.

It is worth paying more attention to this point. In the history of natural philosophy, change and the dynamics of nature have been intimately connected with notions of ausality. For our purposes, we can distinguish three distinct notions of causality: metaphysical, physical, and biological.

The metaphysical notion of causality, which prevailed until the sixteenth century, assumes that the cause is greater than the effect. Thus in theology, the creator is naturally greater—at a higher level of being, intelligence, and power—than the creation. Applied to natural philosophy, this was, from the point of view of the subsequent developments in science, a stumbling block to a proper understanding of nature.

During the sixteenth century, a new understanding of physical causality emerged, according to which the cause and the effect were at the same level. One no longer spoke of a cause being higher than (or in some senses containing) the effect, but rather of a change of one state of matter into another, without assuming a rise or lowering in its level of being, intelligence, or desirability.

The sixteenth-century shift from metaphysical to physical causality was a subtle one: from the domain of intentions, will, reasons, and purposes, and the forces and laws required to carry out these intentions in nature (or, in another language, angels and powers), to a field of forces and laws operating in nature without any purpose.

In the nineteenth century, a biological notion of causality emerged, according to which the cause is lower than the effect. That which is inferior, ontologically or in intelligence or in the subtlety of cellular organization, gives rise to what is superior: amoebas, in time, give rise to Einstein. Since what follows is more desirable than what precedes it (at least from the human point of view), this notion of causality is rightly called evolution.

This principle is the inverse of the metaphysical and the theological notions of causality: rather than proceeding from above, creation—including human beings—now proceeds from below. This idea naturally causes an immense amount of anxiety and unease, especially to those who are comforted by a belief in some ultimate cause, or God, who is personally concerned about their welfare.

Returning now to scientific cosmology: it is only in this century that the idea of a dynamic universe was precisely formulated. One of the solutions to the field equations of general relativity demanded that the universe as a whole be dynamic; otherwise the solution was unstable. This notion of the dynamism of the cosmos seems to have been such a revolutionary idea in the Judeo-Christian world that even a radical thinker like Einstein balked at it. He tinkered with his equations and introduced another factor into them, called the cosmical constant, which was helpful in obtaining a stationary solution to the field equations. Soon after, it was discovered that even with this new, somewhat arbitrarily introduced, constant, dynamic solutions of the equations still resulted. Einstein himself later remarked that the introduction of the cosmical constant in his field equations was “the greatest blunder” of his life.

Within a few years, Edwin Hubble discovered from observational data that the galaxies were receding from one another at the speed of light and that the universe was therefore expanding. This was the most significant observational confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Thus the fundamental equations on which modern physical cosmology is based have nothing to do with evolution, except in the minimal sense of physical change. As far as the notion of causality is concerned, modern cosmology is just like the rest of physics: it describes the change in matter-energy from one state to another. From our point of view, the emergence of the stars, galaxies, solar system, and ultimately ourselves is more desirable than their nonemergence, so we feel justified in describing this change as evolution.

In this process, we are combining two different notions of causality described earlier. We actually need one of these (physical causality) for our knowledge; the other (evolution) is an emotional overlay, for the obvious reason that we humans are at the end of the corresponding change. This fact saddles us with a philosophical problem because of our sentimentality about human beings while nevertheless insisting on a limited physico-biological view of man.

We do not need a limited view of cosmology, which cannot take into account the deepest, spiritual part of ourselves. Physical cosmology, which is a perfectly legitimate and indeed wonderful study in its domain, is concerned with change in the physical form of matter-energy. Here we do not speak—indeed we cannot speak—within the assumptions and procedures that govern the subject of spiritual evolution. Physical theories concerning the nature of the universe are not about the dimension of significance or purpose, nor do they pretend to be,.

At the same time, human beings have always had a sense of, and a need for, the sacred, which gives meaning and purpose both to ourselves and to the cosmos. Fundamentally bereft of the sacred, we are riddled with anxiety and adrift in the meaningless vastness of space-time.

Universe

What do we mean by universe? Presumably, all there is. Does a cat or a bee have the same universe as a human being? Does a tone-deaf or color-blind person have the same universe as a painter or one who is musically gifted? Does a person who is blind to symbols or to spirit, or who is insensitive to wonder, beauty, or spiritual presence, have the same universe as a scientist or a poet or a mystic?

What there is is a function of who sees: what we know, actually and potentially, about the universe depends on the procedures, methods, and interests that we bring to our observation of it. If we do not know how to find angels and are not interested in them, we will say that the angels do not exist. And it is true that they are not a part of our scientific universe. Nor are “the clouds which brood,” which were a part of Wordsworth’s universe, or the dancing colors inhabiting Blake’s universe, or the cherubim and the seraphim singing, “Holy, holy, holy.”

The physical cosmologist’s universe, vast and marvelous as it is, is not all there is. As Shakespeare put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Even when allowance has been made for error and illusion (which can, of course, blight the cosmologist as much as the poet or the mystic), it is difficult simply to dismiss these other fields.

Hardly anyone dismisses the arts out of hand, but many people find it much easier to dismiss the mystic and the theologian. There are understandable historical reasons for this dismissal; in any event, present-day intellectual circles do not regard these fields as relevant to deliberations concerning the cosmos. We relegate the universes that the artist, the musician, or the mystic regard as most precious to a murky and imaginary realm. We certainly do not regard those imaginary realms as real as the multiple universes, the shadow universe, the antiuniverse, or the other weird universes that make up the speculations of contemporary physical cosmologists. We assume that whatever musicians, artists, or mystics might be doing, they are certainly not producing knowledge. Knowledge is produced exclusively by scientists, we would say, and by nobody else.

Contemporary philosophers, with all their love for wisdom, generally agree. We might not now say, with the positivists, that “nonscience is nonsense,” but we would surely say that nonscience cannot lead to knowledge and truth. What we include in the universe is related to a traditional idea of levels of materiality.

Medieval philosophers held that both matter and the laws operating on different planets was were different from those in ours. It was a considerable advance in astronomy to establish that fundamentally the same sort of matter prevailed throughout the universe, subject to the same laws everywhere.

However, when we move from medieval natural philosophy—alchemy, astrology, mathematics, or cosmology—to the modern sciences, our general reaction to the backward-looking nature of the past and our excitement over new discoveries blind most of us to the predominantly symbolic and analogical nature of medieval thought.

There is an ancient analogy between each human being and the universe, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, which inwardly mirror each other’s essential principles. We might then realize that the various planets, the different materials on them, and the different laws operating there were all symbols of different levels of interiority within a human being, and that the quality of matter-energy at different levels of the mind is different from that of the body, and subject to different laws. Sometimes this idea was explicitly shown in various diagrams, but often it was merely assumed, much as we today assume that everyone in all reasonable gatherings naturally accepts the mode of scientific rationality. As Blake succinctly put it, “Reason and Newton are quite two things.” What goes on in our minds and our feelings, and not only what takes place in our bodies, also contributes to all there is.

Mental and psychic functions are not in principle outside the domain of scientific knowledge. They are not supernatural, as opposed to natural, and thus excluded from the investigations of natural philosophy. There is nothing supernatural about most of what gets labeled as miracles or extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perceptions, to be sure, are at present extrascientific perceptions, but there is nothing inherently beyond nature or beyond science in them. It may well be that a radically altered science will be required to understand what is now called extrasensory perception, just as a radically altered science was required to understand lightning in the sky or the light of the sun; this science might have seemed quite supernatural from the perspective of fourteenth-century scientists. It is important to distinguish, as St. Augustine did, between what we claim really is nature and what we know of nature. The limits of our knowledge are not necessarily the limits of nature.

Yet even with a radically altered science that could take account of extrasensory perceptions and other “miraculous” happenings, we cannot come to the end of all there is. “All there is” far exceeds the realm of nature, the domain of causality and materiality, however subtle our descriptions. To say that we do not yet know certain levels of nature is not to say that nature is all that there is to know or that can be.

In fact, practically without exception, all great spiritual teachers, such as the Buddha, the Christ, Patañjali, Krishna, and Moses, have warned against an excessive fascination with miraculous phenomena and occult powers, which are said to be diversions from the true spiritual path.

Two related, although somewhat parenthetical, remarks may be made here. The first concerns an important distinction, made in the scientific revolution starting in the sixteenth century, between the primary and the secondary qualities of matter. This distinction played a crucial role in the development of the physical sciences and also in the subsequent impoverishment of nature. The primary qualities were extension, mass, length and velocity time; to this list was added charge in the nineteenth century, and spin, strangeness, charm, and others in the twentieth. The secondary qualities consisted of taste, color, smell, and the like; they were not considered to be objectively a part of nature, but were subjective and rather unreliable. Considered even more subjective and unreliable were tertiary qualities: feelings of beauty, purpose, or significance.

The secondary and tertiary qualities were gradually eliminated, not only as instruments of inquiry into nature, but also as fundamental constituents of nature. They could not, properly speaking, be studied as themselves constituting reality, but as something that needed to be explained and understood in terms of the primary qualities. Thus a deep-seated reductionism is built into the fundamental presuppositions of scientific inquiry. A division into res extensa (what can be measured) and res cogitans (what is aware) carried within it a certain instability attached to the realm of the mind. From a scientific point of view (as we see clearly in behavioral psychology), all psychic functions must be reducible to external motions.

On the other hand, we have the philosophical problem of mind-body dualism. In some theological circles, it is really understood as soul-body dualism, in which the soul is supernatural, removed from the realm of nature and scientific investigation altogether, and placed in the realm of faith, away from knowledge.

Any real knowledge of the psyche or the soul thus gets rather short shrift: the scientists deny the existence of anything that they cannot study by physical means, and the theologians deny the possibility of any knowledge of it. But in neither case can spiritual qualities have any independent existence in the cosmos that we can study.

The second remark derives from a comparative study of the history of ideas in the Western world and in India. In Greek philosophy and in the early Christian writers, as well as in the Indian tradition, there was a tripartite division of a human being into spirit, soul, and body, or, to use the Greek of St. Paul’s epistles, pneuma, psyche, and soma. Gradually this threefold division shrank into a twofold division: spirit and nature, or mind and matter, or soul and body. Descartes explicitly identifies spirit with soul, and both with the mind. In the Western world, since the time of Descartes, soul has in general been regarded more or less completely as spiritual rather than natural.

A partial reduction of the threefold division into a twofold one took place in India as well. Nevertheless there, in general, the psyche has been regarded as in the realm of nature, and therefore subject to the laws of nature and amenable to scientific inquiry. Thus thoughts and feelings, and psychic phenomena, including those considered paranormal, are in the realm of prakriti, nature—that is to say, in the domain of materiality and causality. According to Indian thought, so-called miracles are not supernatural or spiritual, even though they are unusual and extraordinary. Spirit (purusha), however, is still beyond.

Evidence

We have already seen that our knowledge of the cosmos depends on the procedures, methods, and interests that we bring to knowing it. Niels Bohr was quite right in saying that “it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (in Moore, 406). Of course, even what we can say about nature depends on the mode of discourse that a community of scientists accepts as appropriate. In that discourse, certain kinds of data are acceptable as evidence, and certain other data are not acceptable. The angels that were so real to Blake are not acceptable; nor are Bach’s fugues. In fact, no interior experience is a part of scientific data.

Scientific knowledge is not a knowing-by-participation, but a knowing-by-distancing. It is not an I-thou knowing but an I-it one. Thus we see that scientific knowledge is indeed objective, but not in the mystical sense, in which the observing self is so completely emptied or “naughted” that the object reveals itself as it is, the thing in itself, in all its numinosity and particularity. Sages in all cultures have said that it is only in this state of consciousness, devoid of the self, that an object is known both in its oneness with all there is and in its distinct uniqueness. An entity—a tree, a person, a culture, or the whole cosmos—is then understood both in its interiority and its externality, including its generality and specificity.

Scientific “objectivity” comes from another route, even in the etymology of the word (from the Latin obicere, to throw in the way, to hinder): it is a sense of throwing ourselves over and against something, as in our word objection. One mode is love; the other, combat.

Mystics are constantly speaking about love. We are told that God is love, as in the New Testament; that love supports the whole cosmos, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy; or that love was the first creation and absolutely everything else came from it, as in the Rig Veda. But scientific methods wish to conquer nature as if she were an adversary. In fact, scientists almost never refer to nature as “she”; they always call her “it.”

Naturally, what is dead or was never alive can hardly have intentions, purposes, reasons, or feelings: it can have no interiority. Evidence that involves this sense of interiority, that is based on an I-thou relationship, is out of the scientific arena altogether.

What is at issue here is a different sort of knowing. The important thing is not to see different things, but to see things differently—not changed or expanded contents of the same consciousness, but a different quality of consciousness. Just as one can be in an I-thou relationship with even a cat or a tree, as Martin Buber used to say, one can also bring the I-it attitude to human beings, or even to God, if we seek only to use them as objects. Such, for example, was the attitude of Newton, perhaps the greatest of all scientists; as one of his biographers, Frank Manuel, has remarked, “For Newton, persons were usually objects, not subjects.”

Scientists have no monopoly on the I-it attitude, nor are they, as a class, devoid of the I-thou intercourse. But when they are doing science, they automatically exclude the I-thou attitude, along with any observations based on the interiority of the object, from the body of scientific evidence.

In the last four centuries, there has been a virtual explosion in the number of scientific instruments that have extended our ability to observe the very small and the very far away and to measure extremely small amounts of time. Because of this immense quantitative expansion of the field of our observation, we now see the cosmos with different eyes. There has been an extension, but not a cleansing, of our eyes in the sense that Blake or Goethe would have understood it. Nothing in the nature of science itself might lead us to invoke, with St. Francis, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.”

Any of us—scientists as well as nonscientists—can, of course, be deeply moved by a sense of our oneness with the cosmos. Furthermore, anyone can be struck by the wonder, the mystery, and the design of the cosmos as much today as in the days of Newton or Archimedes or Pythagoras, although unfortunately most of us are all too rarely struck in this way. These feelings and perceptions lie in dimensions different from the ones in which scientific observations are extended. No amount of quantitative expansion of data and theories can lead to the dimension of significance, any more than an endless extension of time can lead to eternity.

Design

It is hard to imagine a scientist who does not see order in the universe, a harmony of the various forces that permit the continued existence of the world, and a pattern involving regularity of phenomena and a generality of laws. The more we know about the universe, the more elegantly and wonderfully well-ordered it appears. Most scientists share with Einstein a “deep conviction of the rationality of the universe,” and his feeling that no genuine scientist could really work without a profound “faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is comprehensible to reason” (Einstein, My Later Years, 26). Einstein himself called this a “cosmic religious feeling,” which he regarded as the “strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” Even though other scientists may be embarrassed by the word religious, they are by no means strangers to the feeling that Einstein is describing.

What puts scientists on guard is not the idea or the feeling of “design” in the universe, but a suspicion that lurking behind the slightest concession in using the word is a theologian who will jump with glee and immediately saddle them with the notion of a Designer and all that goes with it. Scientists are not uneasy about design as such, but about the designs that they smell hiding behind the slightest admission of it! It is no use telling them that the theologians have been on the defensive now for nearly three hundred years and are so eager to gain any approval from their scientific colleagues that they become overenthusiastic if they sniff any possibility of truce.

All of science is a celebration of pattern, regularity, lawfulness, harmony, order, beauty; in other words, all the marks of design. But it does not have much to do with a Designer who is over and above the design, occasionally interfering in the universe in contravention of natural laws. Already in the seventeenth century, Leibniz reminded Newton that his God was like a retired engineer: having created perfect laws and having set the universe initially in motion, he was no longer needed and could be on a permanent sabbatical. The very perfection of scientific laws and their comprehensibility make the continued presence of this sort of God less necessary.

To infer the Designer from the design is largely a theological and linguistic habit. It is based on a notion of design that is more technological in character than scientific or artistic. In art there is always a definite element of play, improvisation, and surprise. No creative work is like painting by numbers; the artist does not know beforehand what the finished product will be like. And any scientist who already knows what he is going to find at the end of his work does not need a research grant, because he hardly needs to carry out the research.

I am not discounting the intuitive conviction that a scientist can have so that he knows the outcome prior to engaging in a detailed calculation or experiment. But every good scientist, even an Einstein or a Newton, has many intuitive convictions that do not lead anywhere. In the actual working out of the ideas and their encounter with what is lies the real delight, excitement, and even terror of creativity. Without them, scientific and artistic activity would be very dull. And any God who might create the universe without delight, without playfulness, without wonder, and without freedom or fresh possibilities would be a very dull God indeed. He would be a God of grim specialists, not of the dilettantes who delight in what they do and study. Such a God could be a good technician carrying out a technical design, a good bureaucrat keeping everyone in his place, or a thorough accountant keeping track of everyone’s actions for later dispensation of necessary judgments; he might even make a good president of a large corporation or a modern university. But he certainly would not make a good scientist, artist, or mystic. Such a God could not be the God of love or wisdom, and it would be very difficult to take delight in him.

Etymologically, design is related to roots meaning sign from. Sign from whom? Historically, in Christian theology, the signs are generally from a personal God. However, there are profound and fundamental incompatibilities between scientific knowledge and the idea of a personal God, even though many great scientists, for example Newton, were deeply committed to a personal God. Here is a brief excerpt from a manuscript of Newton, now in the Jewish National and University Library (Yehuda Ms. 15.3, fol. 46r):

We must believe that there is one God or supreme Monarch that we may fear and obey him and keep his laws and give him honor and glory. We must believe that he is the father of whom are all things, and that he loves his people as his children that they may mutually love him and obey him as their father. We must believe that he is παντοκράτωρ [pantokrator], Lord of all things with an irresistible and boundless power and dominion that we may not hope to escape if we rebel and set up other Gods or transgress the laws of his monarchy, and that we may expect great rewards if we do his will. . . . to us there is but one God the father of whom are all things and we in him and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we by him: that is, but one God and one Lord in our worship.

Since Newton’s time—and partly owing to the very science he took a major hand in creating—scientists are much less comfortable about accepting such a faith in a personal God, and certainly in expressing it. There is a feeling of a fundamental incompatibility between science and such a faith. Most scientists these days are likely to agree with Einstein in his description of what he called his religious feeling as

one of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men. (Einstein, Ideas, 11)

Many people who knew Einstein personally insisted that he was the most religious person they had ever met, but he was not religious in any denominational sense. As he said many times and in many ways, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God” (quoted in New York Times obituary).

Here we see a very good illustration of the fact that being struck by the beauty, harmony, order, and design in the universe does not necessarily mean accepting a personal or a sectarian God. It is worth quoting Einstein at some length on this point, from a remarkable address on “Science and Religion” at a symposium in 1941:

The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God. It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required—not proven. It is mainly a program, and the faith in the possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on partial successes. The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is give up

that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labours they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task. (Einstein, My Later Years, 28–29)

In my judgment (which in this regard is different from Einstein’s), the major cause of the incompatibility between science and theology or church religion, which should certainly not be confused with spirituality, is not so much the concept of a personal God as the restricted view of knowledge that prevails in scientific circles, as remarked earlier, and theologians’ limited notion of the Spirit or Divinity. To have understood (rightly) that Divinity is at least at the level of the human person does not mean that it is only personal. The personal aspects of Being, such as intelligence, intention, will, purpose, and love, which are all marks of interiority, do not have to lead to a concept of a personal God made in the external image of man, with definite form and being separated from others. Uniqueness of any level of being, seen separated from the oneness of all Being, leads to a limitation of vision, to partiality, and to exclusivism.

As the scriptures tell us, human beings are made in the image of God, which I take to mean that a human being is potentially able, in the deepest part of self, to be one with the Divine. This is what the sages have always said everywhere, whether the expression is aham brahmasmi (“I am Brahman,” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10) or “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). However, if we forget the summons for an inward expansion to God, we are bound to reduce God in an outward contraction to human beings.

Concluding Remarks

I have suggested that there is more to the universe and to knowledge than is encountered in physical cosmology; that there are dimensions of the existence and development of being other than in time; and that one can be very spiritual with a personal God or without one. These are practically truisms. My observations have nothing to do with being Eastern or Western. Of course, one is conditioned by one’s cultural background. However, the more deeply one delves into oneself, the more one discovers one’s common humanity with others, and one’s commonality with all there is, without thereby losing one’s uniqueness. In this necessary realization of our oneness as well as uniqueness, we may, each one of us, have to travel paths we do not ordinarily travel, in lands we do not usually inhabit, and experience modes of being not habitually ours.

Different modalities and levels of being, and the corresponding levels of thought and feeling, exist in every human being and even more so in every culture. Some contingent historical factors can overwhelm or underscore a particular modality at any given time. The tremendous impact of science and technology in the West in the last two centuries has made some modes of being now appear to be non-Western. Yet we are now in a particularly exciting situation of a global neighborhood demanding a larger vision of ourselves. A special kind of insensitivity is now required for us to remain culturally parochial, refusing to become heirs of the great wisdom of mankind: as much of Plato as of the Buddha, of Einstein as of Patañjali, of Spinoza no less than of Confucius.

A major conceptual revolution was created in the Western world when the works of Aristotle were discovered by the Latin West through the Arabic philosophers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. That revolution went on for several centuries, leaving no area of thought and culture untouched. It appeared for a time that the major synthesis brought about by Thomas Aquinas between Aristotle and Christian thought was a culmination of this revolution. But no: it rolled on until and including the major scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was finally brought to a close by Newton.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, we have been in the middle of another major encounter of different cultures and different streams of thought, of the West with the East. Moreover, since the Second World War, for the first time in history major cultures are juxtaposed as neighbors without being in the position of either the victor or the vanquished. Who knows where the resulting cultural revolution will end?

One thing, however, is certain: this revolution is bound to result in a recognition, in addition to the experimental science of nature, of an experiential science of the spirit freed from all sectarian theology. This science of the spirit is not the same thing as an extension of our present science to include occult phenomena and extrasensory perceptions. Nor should one be seduced by superficial parallels between certain expressions and paradoxes of contemporary science and ancient Oriental thought.

In his day, Kepler was convinced that the sun was the Father; the circumference of the solar system, the Son; and the intervening space, the Holy Ghost. A latter-day scientist, brought up on different symbols and metaphors, might see in the patterns appearing in the cloud chamber the dance of Shiva, or be moved to find in the complementarity of quantum phenomena yin and yang encircled together, or discover the resolution of the various paradoxes of contemporary physics in the ineffable Tao. These parallels or interpretations are as true or false now as they were then. They add nothing, either to true science or to true spirituality.

There is a deep-seated need in human beings to seek an integration of all their faculties and a unity of their knowledge and feeling. We are fragmented and thirst for wholeness. This thirst, however, cannot be quenched by mere mental conclusions and arguments about the parallels between physics and Buddhism or the existence and nature of the design in the cosmos. We need a radically transformed attitude in the deepest sense, which would permit us to receive true wisdom and intelligence from above ourselves, and to use our science and technology with compassion and love. Without this attitude, we cannot reconcile Blake and Newton, and their heirs. And the lament will continue:

O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose.
For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

(William Blake, Jerusalem 15.9–20)

Sources

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

“Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76; World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist.” The New York Times, April 19, 1955: https://www.nytimes.com/1955/04/19/archives/dr-albert-einstein-dies-in-sleep-at-76-world-mourns-loss-of-great.html

Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, 1954.

——. Out of My Later Years. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

Moore, Ruth. Niels Bohr. New York: Knopf, 1966.

Ravi Ravindra is emeritus professor of physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of a number of books, including The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions; The Gospel of John in the Light of Indian Mysticism; and most recently The Bhagavad Gita: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life. He was interviewed in the winter 2018 issue of Quest.

A version of this article was originally presented as a paper in a symposium sponsored by the Royal Society of Canada and held at McGill University, Montreal, May 30–June 1, 1985. It was published in Origin and Evolution of the Universe: Evidence for Design?, edited by J.M. Robson (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1987), 259–79. The article is also included in Ravi Ravindra, Science and the Sacred: Eternal Wisdom in a Changing World (Wheaton: Quest Books, 2002).

The Cosmic Dance

Printed in the Spring 2021 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Watts, Alan, "The Cosmic Dance" Quest 109:2, pg 22-23

By Alan Watts

Alan Watts is one of the world’s most popular interpreters of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Originally published in 1963, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity is Watts’s forgotten book on world mythology—myths of light and darkness, good and evil, and the mystical unity that sees the transcendent whole behind apparent opposites.

Fans of the mythologist Joseph Campbell will immediately notice his influence throughout this book. Campbell and Watts were in fact friends during its writing, and Campbell shared notes and feedback on several chapters. One might even say that The Two Hands of God is Watts’s own introduction to the mythology of the world’s religions, using the nondual lens for which he was so well known in his Zen teachings and study.

alan watts As there is no woven cloth without the simultaneous interpenetration of warp and woof, there is no world without both the exhalation and inhalation of the Supreme Self. Though the image of breathing, as distinct from weaving, makes the two successive rather than simultaneous, nevertheless the one always implies the other. Successive in time, they are simultaneous in meaning, that is, sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of eternity. Beginning and end, birth and death, manifestation and withdrawal always imply each other. In Western—that is, Judaic and Christian—imagery there has generally been a tendency to overlook this mutuality and to see each life and the creation itself as unique—as a beginning, and then an end which does not imply another beginning. Our world is linear, and the course of time is very strictly a one-way street. Nature is a clockwork mechanism which does not wind itself up in the process of running down. In Western religion and physics alike, we tend to think of all energy as expenditure and evaporation. There is no hope for a renewal of life beyond the end unless the supernatural Creator, by an act of special grace, winds things up again.

But the Indian view of time is cyclic. If birth implies death, death implies rebirth, and likewise the destruction of the world implies its recreation. The Western images are thus essentially tragic. Nature is a fall and its goal is death. There is no necessity for anything to happen beyond the end: only divine grace, operating outside the sphere of necessity, can redeem and restore the world. But the Indian imagery makes the world-drama a comedy—a sport or lila—in which all endings are the implicit promise of beginnings. Yet comedy must always depend on surprise. The burst of laughter is our expression of relief upon discovering that some threatened doom was an illusion—that “death was but the good King’s jest.”

Consider a very simple but typical comedy enacted many years ago in a London music hall. The curtain rises upon an elaborately furnished bedroom. The sleeper is at once awakened by a shrill alarm clock. Reaching under his pillow, he produces a hammer and smashes it in the face. Sitting up in bed, he glowers at his early-Monday-morning surroundings, and, hammer still in hand, slowly crawls out from the covers. Thereupon he proceeds, item by Victorian item, to smash everything in the bedroom—the bedside table, the flowered pitcher and basin on the wash stand, the knickknacks on the mantel, the chocolate-colored chamber pot patterned with green leaves, the glass on the pictures, the windows, and the bed itself—leaving only a bulbous and pretentious floor lamp with a huge glass shade. Creeping stealthily across the wreckage he eyes this last and perfect object of his rage, very obviously designed to disintegrate with a spectacular explosion. Instead of smashing it with his hammer, he grasps it with both hands and flings it high into the air—and, falling to the floor, it bounces: made of rubber.

This is the vulgar archetype of the cosmic punch line, the totally unexpected anticlimax which, in Hindu mythology, follows the terrifying tandava—the dance in which ten-armed Shiva, wreathed in fire, destroys the universe at the end of each cycle. But Shiva is simply the opposite face of Brahma, the Creator, so that as he turns to leave the stage with the world in ruin, the scene changes with his turning, and all things are seen to have been remade under the cover of their destruction.

The polarity of Brahma and Shiva thus finds its expression in what at times seems to be the extreme ambivalence of Hindu culture—extreme in its asceticism as in its sensuality. On the one hand, there is the goal of Yoga, the meditation-discipline: to concentrate thought so as to penetrate and burn away the illusion of the world. Yoga is thus man’s participation in the inhalation or withdrawal of the world breath, in the dissolution of maya, and in return to the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead. Shiva, the destructive aspect of Godhead, is therefore the archetypal yogi, the naked ascetic daubed with ashes sitting hour after hour with his consciousness in total stillness. On the other hand, there is that exuberant delight in form and flesh which is so exquisitely celebrated in Hindu dancing, music, and sculpture, in the marvelously refined eroticism of the Kamasutra, the scripture of love, as well as in the vision of the perfectly governed society laid out in the Arthashastra, the scripture of politics. One might almost say that India had set herself the problem of exploring these two attitudes to their extremes and then of finding the synthesis between them.

This problem, stated in mythological terms, is the recurrent theme of a type of popular Hindu literature known as the Puranas. Certainly much later than the Upanishads, these are texts of uncertain date, forming a repository of myth and legend accumulated over many centuries. Notable in the Puranas is the relationship of the gods to their feminine counterparts or shaktis, the feminine symbols of maya, the world-illusion, whereby the male god is alternatingly seduced and disenchanted. Originally the Godhead is hermaphroditic, beyond the opposites, but at the moment of creation the feminine shakti leaps forth spontaneously, as Eve was created from the body of Adam while he slept.

Alan Watts (1915–73) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, speaker, and counterculture hero, best known as an interpreter of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote more than twenty-five books and numerous articles applying the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy to our everyday lives.

Bridging the Worlds of Matter, Mind, and Spirit

Printed in the Spring 2021 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Carr, Bernard, "Bridging the Worlds of Matter, Mind, and Spirit" Quest 109:2, pg 14-21

By Bernard Carr

bernard carr All of us inhabit the three worlds of matter, mind, and spirit, though these terms can be used in different contexts. For example, they correspond to different modes of knowing (senses, reason, contemplation), to different academic disciplines (sciences, humanities, religious studies), and to different types of embodiment (physical, mental, spiritual) within esoteric traditions. They are also associated with different paths in life (scientist, artist, mystic), and this is the context on which I will focus here.

While everyone has a foot in all three worlds, the amount of time we spend in each one clearly varies, and most people are drawn to one path. Ambitious people in particular generally focus on a single path, because success usually depends on being very dedicated: a successful scientist must be narrowly focused on their area of specialty, while a dedicated mystic must devote their whole life (or even many lives) to their goal, unimpeded by distractions in the material domain. Specialization is necessary because the evolution of humanity as a whole evidently depends upon many individuals fulfilling their potential in some narrow area of expertise.

Nevertheless, this article will emphasize that it is important for some people to follow all three paths because the different worlds are connected and a full understanding of the universe must surely embrace them all.

As illustrated in figure 1, the three worlds are connected by various bridges. There is a lot of emphasis on the bridge between science and religion at the bottom, but the other two bridges are equally important. The nature of each bridge also depends on which branch of science, art form, or mystical tradition is involved. There are many bridges, and even someone aspiring to follow all three paths only glimpses a small part of the rich nexus of connections.

In this essay I will try to illustrate this idea with reference to my own life, since I’ve tried to follow all three paths. Although this may appear self-indulgent, hopefully the lessons I have learnt will be of general interest. Because of my specific interests, I regard psychical research as providing a bridge between matter and mind, transpersonal psychology as providing a bridge between mind and spirit, and the anthropic principle as providing a bridge between matter and spirit. This is indicated by the green connections in figure 1. However, someone approaching the subject from the perspective of medicine or the arts would see a different set of bridges.


	Figure 1. This diagram shows various aspects (red text) of the three worlds (blue circles), some bridges between them (green links), and the central role of consciousness. Diagrams in this article by Bernard Carr.

Building a bridge requires effort and is generally resisted by people on both sides. As regards my first bridge, many scientists don’t want a link with psychical research because they don’t believe in the phenomena; on the other hand, many psychical researchers don’t want a link with science, since they see it as too materialistic. As regards my second bridge, many psychical researchers prefer to avoid trespassing into spiritual domains because they fear this will tarnish their scientific image; on the other hand, many spiritual practitioners avoid psychical research because they believe the scientific approach will distract from the spiritual path. As regards my third bridge, many scientists resist the notion that there is any room for a divine element in the universe; on the other hand, many mystics resist attempts to understand the divine through the methods of science.

Personally I disagree with all these opponents to bridge building, partly because I have my own proposal for a model which purports to unify matter, mind, and spirit. I will briefly describe this in the third part of this essay, and a fuller description can be found elsewhere (Carr, “Hyperspatial Models,” “Worlds Apart”). However, my model could be wrong, so I prefer to frame the discussion within the broader context of attempts to find a unifying paradigm—for example, the perennial philosophy, various forms of esoteric science, and most recently the postmaterialist science movement. All these approaches regard consciousness as a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the universe, which is why consciousness is placed at the center of figure 1.

An excellent exposition of approaches to the unification of matter, mind, and spirit can be found in the two volumes edited by Ed Kelly et al.: Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism. These were the result of a series of workshops held at California’s Esalen Institute, some of which I also attended. The group seeks a middle way between the polarized fundamentalisms of science and religion—an enlarged conception of nature anchored in science and including spiritual realities. The following quote from Beyond Physicalism summarizes their position: “We think it requires astonishing hubris to dismiss en masse the collective wisdom and experience of a large proportion of our forbears, including persons widely recognized as pillars of all human civilization, and we believe that the single most important task confronting all of modernity is that of meaningful reconciliation of science and religion.”

My Personal Path

When I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at Harrow—a well-known English public school—I misbehaved and as a punishment was “roomed” for a week, which meant that, apart from lessons, I was confined to my room. Having nothing else to do, I read three books which determined the subsequent course of my life. The first, The ABC of Relativity by Bertrand Russell, was about Einstein’s theory of relativity and got me interested in physics and the nature of space and time. The second, An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne, was about his precognitive dreams and got me interested in psychical research. The third, The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa, allegedly by a Tibetan lama who had taken over the body of a plumber from Devonshire, England, was about various psychic and mystical experiences associated with his life as a monk; this book got me interested in Buddhism and religious experience. It is strange that my misbehavior had such beneficial consequences!

These three books not only triggered my interest in science, psychical research, and religion but also made me aware that these three domains are intrinsically linked. The link between the first and second books was time, while the link between the second and third was psychical experience. Despite my limited knowledge of the subject, I became convinced that my life’s purpose was to develop a theory of physics which could accommodate psychic and spiritual phenomena. I even had a primitive notion of how this could be achieved by invoking extra dimensions, and over the next year I spent almost every free hour writing an overlong and pretentious dissertation on the topic. I sent it to Hermann Bondi, the leading cosmologist of the day, who (remarkably) read it and wrote back to me. He said that from a cosmological perspective it was lacking in interest, because it did not make any predictions. I realized with a shock that this was correct, but it did not dampen my enthusiasm.

A little later, I became interested in out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) as a result of reading The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington. This discussed techniques for inducing the experience, which I was eager to try. I recall waking up one night in the lounge of my home while my physical body was still in the bedroom. Although I couldn’t be sure this was not an illusion, I was sufficiently worried that I really was out of my body to be frightened by the experience. So for a while I tried to stop having OBEs, and it was not until I started meditating several years later that I started having them again spontaneously.

Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the notion that consciousness can leave the body and visit other places, maybe even beyond the physical world. This claim clearly challenged the standard view of physics, suggesting that there are levels of reality that go beyond ordinary space and time.

In 1968 I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate to read mathematics. Keen to pursue my interests further, I immediately joined three university societies: the Cambridge University Astronomical Society (CUAS), the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR) and the Cambridge University Buddhist Society (CUBS). Although my academic studies were most closely related to the first, I spent most of my time in activities related to the other two. With the CUSPR, I devoted many hours to conducting ESP experiments, visiting haunted houses, and investigating mediums under the guidance of Tony Cornell, a leading ghost hunter of the time who was to become my mentor and close friend. With the CUBS, I took up samatha (calmness) meditation with Nai Boonman, a teacher from Thailand, and began to study Buddhist philosophy.

Not many CUSPR members were spiritually inclined, and not many CUBS members were psychically inclined. However, I always thought the activities of the two groups were linked. After all, meditation is supposed to lead to the development of psychic powers (siddhis), and I probably had more psychic experiences through meditation than through CUSPR activities.

I also tried to link my interests in these areas through experiments. The first was a telepathy experiment with the samatha group after a meditation session, in which I looked at images with strong emotional content and the meditators had to “pick up” the emotions. I think the group was surprised that Nai approved, but he did and we found interesting (if unexpected) results. There was a correlation, but it was with another of the meditators rather than with me!

The second experiment involved an attempt to weigh the soul at Addenbrookes Hospital in 1970. The idea was that the soul might leave the physical body during sleep, so if the soul has weight, this should be indicated by a decrease in weight on falling asleep and a corresponding increase on awakening. I cannot claim that the results were very convincing, because my apparatus was very crude, but many of my undergraduate friends still remember me as the person who weighed their souls. This illustrates how a spiritual question—about the existence of the soul—can potentially be addressed scientifically.

These were also the groups within which I formed my deepest friendships. I found my CUBS friends were gentler and more loving than my Christian friends and always hugging each other. Among them was Pete Betts, a natural science student with long, black, curly hair, who was also a member of the CUSPR. He was a much more devout Buddhist than me, and he later became Ajahn Brahm, the founder of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia. (Keeping the Water Still: An Interview with Ajahn Brahm appeared in the winter 2018 issue of Quest.) I first met him when I was manning the CUBS stall at the University Societies Fair. Apparently I discouraged him from paying his subscription until he had attended a meeting to check that Buddhism was his cup of tea, but he insisted on joining immediately. Some of my memories of our friendship are recorded (Carr, “Ajahn Brahm”).

I also formed close links with the Tibetan Buddhist community. When Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche visited my rooms in Trinity one evening, I was so awestruck that the armchair in which he had sat became an object of veneration for a while. Another friend was Sogyal Rinpoche, who was a student at Cambridge in attendance with Tenzing Namgyal (the crown prince of Sikkim, whom I’d known at Harrow). Sogyal was fascinated by science, so he taught me Tibetan meditation, and I taught him physics. He also arranged for a visit by the Dalai Lama, and we all had tea together with other CUBS members in Trinity College.

After graduating, I realized I could not pursue a career as a Buddhist, so I had to decide whether to study for a PhD in cosmology, the area of physics in which I was most interested, or parapsychology, the area to which I was devoting most of my time. I therefore spent the summer working with Dr. John Beloff in Edinburgh (the only academic psychical researcher at the time), ostensibly to write up some of the CUSPR experiments but also to see if I was interested in doing a PhD in the subject. In the end, Professor Donald West (an eminent criminologist but also an experienced psychical researcher) advised me that there were no career prospects in parapsychology and that I would benefit the field more in the long run if I first established myself in a respectable field and then championed it as an outsider. Also, since my ambition was still to extend physics to accommodate mind and associated phenomena, I realized that I needed to gain a better understanding of physics in order to achieve this.

Another incident influenced my decision. One evening during my undergraduate period, I was watching a TV documentary, The Violent Universe, which described the latest developments in astrophysics and cosmology (such as the evidence for black holes, pulsars, and the big bang). I was enthralled by this, but what most impressed me was a scene in which the astronomer Maarten Schmidt was peering at a distant quasar through the Mount Palomar telescope while listening to the third movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I was transfixed by both the music and the science and immediately resolved to buy the record of Beethoven’s symphony (which I did the next day) and become an astronomer (which I did a few years later). But what most impressed me was the realization that there is a spiritual aspect to the wonder of the heavens.

So I chose to do a PhD in cosmology and was fortunate that Stephen Hawking was assigned as my supervisor. He wasn’t so famous then—indeed I had barely heard of him—but he’d already made important scientific contributions, and I was somewhat awed when my tutor (the physicist Jeffrey Goldstone) told me that he was the most brilliant person in the department. Ours was not the usual type of student-supervisor relationship. Because of Stephen’s disability, I spent a lot of time with him, sharing an office with him and living with his family for a year when we visited Caltech in 1975. We became good friends, and although I stopped working with him after my PhD, I maintained my friendship with the family. I’ve recorded some of my memories of him elsewhere (Carr, “Stephen Hawking”).

Working with such a great physicist certainly gave me a good start in my professional life. I was also lucky that my PhD coincided with his discovery of Hawking radiation, because this gave me a ringside seat for one of the most important developments in twentieth-century physics. In fact, my most cited paper is the first one I wrote with Stephen in 1974 on primordial black holes. These are black holes that formed in the early universe and the only ones which could be small enough for Hawking radiation to be important. I’ve continued to study these objects for forty-five years, but we still do not know for sure whether they exist. If they do, then I helped to pioneer an important field of research. If they don’t, then a lot of effort has been wasted. So an interesting feature of the scientific path is that one may not know for a long time whether it leads anywhere interesting.

As is well known, Stephen was not enamored of religious ideas, and although he was blessed by four popes and interred at Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton, he certainly never aspired to be spiritual. People sometimes ask me why I didn’t try to interest him in spiritual matters, but I always avoided that. The spiritual path is not suitable for everyone, and he would surely not have made such an enormous contribution to physics if he had turned his attention in that direction. Humanity needs both spiritually and scientifically enlightened people, but only a few of them need to be—or would aspire to be—both. Nonetheless, he was still a spiritual inspiration to many people, partly because of his cosmological revelations but also because of his courageous fight against disability.

Stephen was also skeptical of psychic phenomena (although he had read a book by the parapsychologist J.B. Rhine as a teenager), but I did occasionally discuss my interest in the subject with him. On one occasion I had a dream in which he explained how I could solve an equation. When I awoke, I remembered the dream and the advice turned out to be correct, so I mentioned this to Stephen to check whether he had shared the dream. He hadn’t and dismissed any suggestion that telepathy might be involved, so I joked that in that case he would not be on the paper! After forty-five years I’m not confident this memory is accurate—I doubt that I would have been so cheeky—but I do recall the dream.

After my PhD, I remained at Cambridge for another ten years and continued to conduct experiments in psychical research. My most important influence was Professor Ian Stevenson, who used to visit Darwin College, Cambridge, as a guest of Donald West. Ian was best known for his work with children who remember previous lives, providing another interesting link between psychical research and religion. In the summer of 1980 Stevenson invited me to visit his group at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where I met Carlos Alvarado, Emily Cook, and Satwant Pasricha. I also became a member of the national Society for Psychical Research and joined its council. My main contribution was to organize its study days and annual conferences, which I did for thirty-five years, and to chair its research activities committee for a while. I served as its president in 2000–04 and am still a vice-president. I also joined Donald West as a manager of the Perrott-Warrick fund, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge, and the main source of funds for research in the area. I succeeded him as secretary in 1995, and I like to think this has enabled me to make a positive contribution to the subject.

My Buddhist links also led to other religious and esoteric contacts. Through Lance Cousins, one of the key people in CUBS, I was introduced to Glyn Davies, a Kabbalah teacher who became another important influence on my life. This led to the formation of a Kabbalah group in Cambridge and later to the founding of a UK-wide religious philosophy group called Saros, formed from an amalgamation of influences from Kabbalah, Buddhism, G.I. Gurdjieff, and Sufism. The group has now broken up, but it has sown many seeds, which are still bearing fruit. My own religious energies are now channeled into the Scientific and Medical Network, an organization founded nearly fifty years ago, which promotes consciousness studies and the links between science and spirituality. One of its important recent achievements has been the production of the Galileo Commission Report (Walach), which advocates an expanded view of science, very much in the spirit of this essay and the postmaterialist science movement.

The Anthropic Principle: Linking Cosmology to Mind and Spirit

In 1979, Martin Rees and I wrote a paper for Nature entitled “The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World.” The first part of the paper showed that the mass and length scales of all naturally occurring objects in the physical world depend on just a few dimensionless coupling constants. That was conventional physics, so there was nothing controversial about it (although it has some surprising results). The second part showed that there are unexplained coincidences involving the constants of physics in order that there can be observers in the universe: this is called the anthropic principle. People had been writing about this for a while—the word anthropic was actually coined by my colleague Brandon Carter in 1974—but we were able to bring all the anthropic constraints together.

The paper had quite an impact because it was the first time Nature had published a review on this topic. However, many physicists were very opposed to the anthropic principle, because they regarded speculating about counterfactual universes as philosophy rather than science. Indeed, some felt it was theology, because a fine-tuned universe suggests a tuner, which smelled of God. The term anthropic was also unfortunate, because it comes from the Greek word for human and therefore suggests that the universe is created for humans in particular. But these coincidences are not specific to humans; they are just required in order to have galaxies, stars, planets, and chemistry, so I prefer to call it the complexity principle. In any case, for many years the term anthropic was taboo in physics circles, so people would just refer to the “A” word.

Some forty years later, the situation has changed, and the topic has become respectable in the sense that eminent physicists (like Steven Weinberg, Leonard Susskind, and Stephen Hawking) take it seriously. The reason is that we now have the concept of the multiverse: the idea that our universe may be one of a large number of universes, in which the constants could be different. This concept isn’t just invoked to explain the anthropic tunings but comes out of independent developments in particle physics and cosmology.

For example, one of the predictions of M-theory (which I will discuss later) is that there could be a string landscape in which there can be many different vacuum states. It used to be hoped that M-theory would give a unique solution in which all the constants would be determined, but it now looks as though there could be a huge number of solutions, maybe 10⁵⁰⁰. The concept of the multiverse has also come out of developments in cosmology. A popular view is that the early universe went through an inflationary phase in which it was expanding exponentially fast because of the effects of the vacuum energy. This can create lots of bubbles in which the constants of nature are different; our visible universe is just part of one of those bubbles.

The multiverse provides a natural basis for the anthropic principle. The tuning of the physical constants seems like a miracle if there is only one universe, but it is a natural selection effect if there are many universes, since we are necessarily in one that can support life. For many physicists, this has legitimized anthropic reasoning, because one no longer needs to invoke God. On the other hand, some physicists don’t like the multiverse either and regard the idea as just as mystical as that of God. There is certainly a legitimate debate about whether it counts as science or philosophy. From my perspective, the multiverse theory neither proves nor disproves the existence of God, because if God can create one universe, presumably he can create as many as he wants.

There’s still the question of what the anthropic principle is selecting for. The original assumption was that it relates to the presence of observers in the universe. But what counts as an observer? Is it only a human being, or would a mouse or an ant or a computer qualify? We do not know the answer to this, but my own view is that it must relate to consciousness, because this is the natural culmination of the complexity which the tunings have allowed to arise during the big bang. I just don’t think that it’s related to human beings in particular.

The anthropic arguments certainly suggest a matter-mind link in figure 1. Whether they suggest a matter-spirit link is more controversial. While physicists of a mystical disposition may see evidence for the divine in the revelations of modern cosmology (Wilber), more atheistically inclined ones (such as Hawking) come to the opposite conclusion. The “C” word (consciousness) is slowly becoming respectable, but the “S” word (spirituality) remains taboo in most quarters.

Linking Matter, Mind, and Spirit with Higher Dimensions

Physics has been triumphant in explaining the multitude of structures in the material world, from the smallest scales of subatomic physics to the scale of the observable universe. It has also been able to unify the various forces which link the microscopic and macroscopic domains. The culmination of this link is the big bang, from which the universe emerged 13.8 billion years ago. Physicists also claim to be close to a “Theory of Everything.” However, I’ve always been skeptical of this claim, because current physics makes no reference to the most conspicuous aspect of the world—consciousness and the whole domain of mental experience. For example, I recall attending the premiere of the Oscar-winning film The Theory of Everything with the Hawking family in London some years ago. This movingly portrayed Stephen’s relationship with his first wife, Jane, but I found the title rather ironic, since the film was primarily about love, which is a phenomenon that a Theory of Everything will surely never explain.

Most physicists assume that consciousness is an epiphenomenon produced by the brain, with mental experiences being outside the domain of physics altogether. However, I don’t see why in principle physics shouldn’t be expanded to accommodate them. Furthermore, if one accepts the evidence from psychical research that consciousness can interact directly with the physical world (as opposed to indirectly, via the brain), then one definitely needs an extension of physics which accommodates them. Twenty years ago consciousness was a taboo topic within physics, but now it’s almost mainstream. One reason for this is the role of the observer in quantum theory and the possibility that consciousness may collapse the wave function, with Roger Penrose even relating consciousness to quantum gravity.


Figure 2. The amalgamation of space and time by relativity theory, and of matter and mind by quantum theory, suggests a deeper amalgamation, in which highter dimensions may play a role.

Nevertheless, I don’t think that quantum theory alone can provide a full description of mental experience. After all, nobody understands quantum theory anyway, so merely explaining one mystery with another has little appeal. One probably needs a deeper paradigm which underlies both quantum theory and mental experience. Indeed, just as relativity theory links space and time through spacetime and quantum theory links matter and mind through observation, perhaps the final theory of quantum gravity which amalgamates relativity theory and quantum theory will accommodate mind in some way. This is illustrated in figure 2.

My personal view is that this deeper paradigm relates to the possible existence of higher dimensions. Most people adopt the common-sense Newtonian view that the arena of reality is the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. This view works well in everyday life, but it was demolished in 1905 with the advent of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, in which reality is four-dimensional and time is the fourth dimension, and then with general relativity in 1915, in which gravity is interpreted as the curvature of spacetime. Then in the 1920s Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein showed that introducing a fifth dimension could provide a geometrical unified picture of gravity and electromagnetism. However, the fifth dimension in this model is wrapped up on the Planck length of 10^-33 centimeters, so we cannot see it.

For many decades most physicists lost interest in this possibility, since we have learned that there are other forces, but in the 1980s it was realized that these could also be described by invoking extra dimensions. Superstring theory posited that there are ten dimensions, so one has the four macroscopic dimensions—three space plus one time—together with six internal dimensions. There were many different versions of superstring theory, but then in the 1990s it was realized that one could have an amalgamation of all of these, called M-theory, with one more dimension (giving a total of eleven). In one particular version, an extra dimension is extended, and the material world is regarded as a four-dimensional “brane” in a five-dimensional “bulk.” This is illustrated in figure 3.


	Figure 3. The paradigms of increasing dimensionality suggested by the history of phsics (left), with spacetime regarded as a slice of a higher-dimensional structure in one version (right).

I suggest that one also needs a higher-dimensional space to describe mental and psychic experiences. For example, ordinary dreams take place in a space which can appear just as real as physical space and in a lucid dream it can be hard to tell the difference. Some paranormal experiences—such as an OBE or NDE—also involve some sort of space, which is not the same as physical space but bears some relationship to it. Accounts of apparitions are usually dismissed by skeptics as hallucinations, but there are also collective apparitions, which are seen by more than one person at the same time, or the traditional ghost, which is seen by different people at different times. These apparitions don’t seem to be in normal physical space, because they cannot be photographed, but they appear to be localized. Many mystical and psychedelic experiences also involve some form of space, and sometimes this is explicitly described as higher-dimensional.

My starting point therefore is that many mental experiences—be they normal or paranormal or transpersonal—involve some form of space or perhaps even a hierarchy of spaces. I term this the Universal Structure and link it with the higher-dimensional space of physics. For if the physical world corresponds to a four-dimensional brane in a higher-dimensional bulk (as depicted in figure 3), it is natural to ask what else resides in the bulk. The only other entities of which we are aware are mental. The important point is that this higher-dimensional approach goes beyond the normal four-dimensional view of materialistic classical physics. Because it is communal, it corresponds to an extended reality or Universal Mind.

I should stress that this connection between Universal Mind and higher dimensions is not the view of mainstream physics. Indeed, most of my M-theory colleagues would be horrified by this proposal, partly because they don’t accept the reality of some of the phenomena I’m trying to explain. Note that I claim that one needs a five-dimensional structure even to describe normal mental experiences (that is, percepts associated with the physical world). However, because of my interest in psychical and spiritual phenomena, I want to go beyond that and invoke further dimensions, for my experiences in these domains, however limited, have convinced me that there are levels of reality that go beyond the purely materialistic one. Most of my colleagues do not share my ambition to extend physics to accommodate these higher levels of reality because they have not had the relevant experiences.

Final Reflections

The events described in the above reflections stretch back fifty years, and some of the friends who influenced my life went on to become very famous. Not all of them would have approved of my enthusiasm for bridge building. For example, few of my eminent scientific friends have shared my interest in matters psychical and spiritual. Nevertheless, they have all played a special role in my attempts to link the three worlds.

Sadly, many of the people who feature in my account have now passed on. Perhaps the most famous was Stephen Hawking. I last saw him at a small tea party to celebrate his seventy-sixth birthday in 2018. He died a few months later, coincidentally on Einstein’s birthday. Since he was also born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death, it’s odd that he should be connected to his two greatest heroes in this way. I doubt Stephen would have attributed much significance to this, but he would certainly acknowledge that we don’t understand the mystery of time. In any case, the synchronicity is fitting because his first major discovery was that spacetime trajectories can have singular endpoints where strange things may happen.

As regards my own life, although my cosmological career got off to a good start, I soon found that as a result of becoming a professional academic, my time was being taken up by all the usual activities which this entails (giving lectures and administrative duties). So I’ve not been able to spend as much time as I would like on my cosmological research and I’m certainly not in the same league as Stephen Hawking. The amount of time I’ve been able to spend on psychical research and spiritual activities has been even more limited. Most of my experimental work in psychical research remains unpublished, and my main contribution has been on the theoretical side. If my hyperspatial model turns out to be correct, this will be important, but this probably won’t be known within my lifetime. My progress on the mystical path has been even less impressive, and enlightenment must certainly wait until another lifetime!

On the other hand, this is not an expression of regret, because—as I have explained in this article—I decided long ago that my purpose in life was to build bridges. If the price for the breadth required is that I’ve been a less successful scientist, psychical researcher, or mystic than I might have been, I’m fine with that. However, having recently retired, I now have more time to devote to my three passions, so I still hope to complete the magnum opus which I began writing at the age of fifteen.

Sources

Carr, B.J. “Ajahn Brahm at Cambridge.” In Enlightened Times: Newsletter of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia (winter 2016): 6–7.

———. “Hyperspatial Models of Matter and Mind.” In Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality. Edited by E. Kelly, A. Crabtree, and P. Marshall. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield 2015, 227–73.

———. “Stephen Hawking: Recollections of a Singular Friend.” In Paradigm Explorer 1 (2018): 9–13.

———. Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

———. “Worlds Apart: Can Psychical Research Bridge the Gulf between Matter and Mind?” In Proceedings of Society for Psychical Research, 59 (2008): 1–96.

Carr, B.J., and M.J. Rees. “The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World.” Nature 278 (1979): 605–12.

Kelly, E.F., A. Crabtree, and P. Marshall. Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Kelly, E.F., E.W. Kelly, A. Crabtree, A. Gauld, M. Grosso, and B. Greyson. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the Twenty-first Century. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Walach, H. Galileo Commission Report: Beyond a Materialist Worldview—Towards an Expanded Science. London: Scientific and Medical Network, 2019.

Wilber, K., ed. Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists. Boston: Shambhala, 2001.

Bernard Carr is emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. For his PhD, he studied the first second of the universe with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and Caltech. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, black holes, dark matter, and the anthropic principle. He is president of the Scientific and Medical Network and a former president of the Society for Psychical Research.