On the Spirituality of Physics: One
It is said that we all have at least one love language.
johnhain on Pixabay
For some, it’s cooking. For me, one of them is playing music.
I believe the Universe has a multitude of these love languages, enough so that each of us can hear at least one and be drawn back by love to the Source of all that is. The one I first heard, many decades ago, was physics. I know it sounds odd, but bear with me…
Iin my several decades of inquiry, I have come to see spirituality as the name given to the search for what does lie behind the physical world… and for the possibility of seeing beyond the materialist view. For me, spirituality is neither a religion nor a set of beliefs. It is rather a path, in particular a pathway to a deeper understanding of life that can free us from the pain and sadness we feel when we confront the world in its current state.
How could physics contribute to that?
Let’s start by “listening” to the language of physics. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were four basic threads or principles that were woven through that worldview. They are:
Determinism
Reductionism
Materialism
Zero-sum-ism (I made that one up…)
Determinism means that everything that happens is determined by the state of the universe immediately before it happens. This applies to all the atoms in the universe… including the ones that make up our brains!
Reductionism means that to find out what something really is, you reduce it to its smallest indivisible components.
Materialism means that matter is the fundamental stuff of the universe, and everything is made of it… including consciousness!
Zero-sum-ism means that the “stuff” of the world is what’s real, it’s finite, and whatever is gained somewhere is lost everywhere else.
These four threads constituted physics at the beginning of the last century. That’s relatively easy to see. Harder to see is that they are woven through our collective worldview, our understanding of the world, to this day.
Back in 1974, I had a powerful, personal experience that ultimately cured me of my belief in those threads. You can read about it in either of my two books, The Seer’s Explanation or Hoodwinked: Exploring Our Culture’s Profound Illusions. Bottom line is, I had a direct and personal experience that while the laws of the physical universe are rigidly enforced, they can be suspended temporarily if the Universe wants to make a point. In addition, I had a direct and personal experience that while we perceive that consciousness resides within a body, it need not, and can be recognized to simply Be, unembodied.
I had to surrender determinism as a principle when I realized that what happened to me could not have been caused by anything that was in the world before that experience.
I had to release reductionism when I investigated quantum physics and understood that there are no smallest indivisible components to anything; there are just vibrations in various fields.
I had to give up materialism when I experienced that consciousness exists apart from matter.
Zero-sum-ism vaporized for me when I came to understand that what we think of as the external world isn’t external at all.
Now, I realize that last one is a bold (if not ridiculous) statement to make. It’s completely counter-intuitive, but the idea is really very simple. I’m inviting you to participate in a thought experiment. To get started, identify an object in your field of view.
The story we’re told about vision is that light from a source, be it a star or a lightbulb, is reflected off that object and enters your eye. The light is focused on your retina, which contains rods and cones that transform the light energy into electrical impulses. These vibrations are conducted by the optic nerve to the brain.
Our brains then make three-dimensional pictures out of these impulses, much like televisions create pictures out of the electrical signals in the cable. These pictures (and sounds, etc.) constitute an interpretation of sensory input. They become a three-dimensional view, our view of the world.
Here’s my ask: that you seriously consider the possibility that what you’re looking at right now is a picture in your brain.
That picture is not “out there,” whereever out there might be. It’s within you, in your brain!
We humans mistake our pictures for the “real” world. What is the real world? We don’t know! We have no access to it, because our pictures of it, our interpretations of our sensory input, always stand in between. We walk around in this interpretation, inside these pictures we mistake for a real, external world.
We assume that our interpretations represent something that exists out there, independent of us. But there is no way to demonstrate that. And because you can’t demonstrate the independent existence of the world, the idea that it exists as we “know” it is a belief, a conceptualization.
When you see the world you know as a conceptualization, you have to release the independent reality of those four fundamental threads I spoke of earlier: determinism, reductionism, materialism, and zero-sumism. They become part of the concept, the belief system, the picture of the world. And when that happens, you find that you are creating the entirety of the world you experience!
Oh, and here’s the kicker. The brain that creates a picture of the world out of sensory input? It’s part of the picture! It doesn’t exist independent of you any more than the rest of the world does. Brains don’t create consciousness. They exist as part of a picture created within consciousness as an explanation of what’s really going on.
Chew on that for a while. It will transform the quality of your life if you let it.
