This post continues ongoing themes of mine, the need for a new paradigm — a reunification of science and religion — quantum physics as the key to this reunification, and the existence of an Ancient Wisdom, suggesting that earlier cultures were highly sophisticated spiritually and scientifically.

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    Sir James Jeans, following the early developments in quantum physics, summed up the dramatic shift from the old to the new paradigm in these words:

    “Thirty years ago, we thought, or assumed, that we were heading towards an ultimate reality of a mechanical kind. It seemed to consist of a fortuitous jumble of atoms, which was destined to perform meaningless dances for a time under the action of blind purposeless forces, and then fall back to form a dead world. Into this wholly mechanical world, through the play of the same blind forces, life had stumbled by accident…

    “Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter — not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts” (1).

    Thus the physical universe seems to emerge from another non-material level, an idea which led David Bohm to develop the concept of explicate and implicate orders. It seems, however, that this idea was not new, for spiritual traditions have been saying that, sometimes for thousands of years. For example, Jeans quotes Plato’s allegory of the cave as the epigram for his book.

    Writing in the 1890s, before the quantum revolution, the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater said: “The Anu (by which they mean a sub-atomic particle) can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed. It is formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb… Presumably, were that flow checked but for an instant, the whole physical world would vanish… It is only the persistence of that flow which maintains the physical basis of the universe” (2).

    The physical universe is therefore sustained in being or, as Jeans puts it, thought into existence. It was not created at some point in the past, as you might be led to believe by the language of Genesis in the Bible.

    How does this process actually work? We are all familiar with the term ‘motion picture’ or ‘movie’. That was not literally true, however, because films were actually a rapid succession of still frames. The original technology operated at 24 frames per second, and at that speed the human eye was incapable of noticing this and saw instead an illusion of motion. Could this also be true of the universe?

    The physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben say that information connects “all points in space with all others in an indefinite number of possible patterns, constantly changing, and turning on and off at incredible frequencies up to 10⁴³ times per second”. That is billions upon billions of times! It is hardly surprising that we don’t notice this. They also say that “every action in ‘real’ time is an indefinite sequence of materializations and dematerializations on the microscopic quantum-level. They occur faster than the speed of light and in such great numbers that perception of this action is continual” (3).

    It’s possible that not all scientists have accepted this, but it is at least a statement from a scientific source. Coming from a spiritual perspective, the ancient Hindus came to exactly the same conclusion. According to Robert Cox: “In the Vedic texts, this constant process of creation and annihilation was called nitya pralaya”. He goes on to quote the Bhagavata Mahapurana: “Some men, knowing the subtle state of things… declare the creation and dissolution of all beings, from Brahma downward, as taking place all the time. The successive stages undergone by all changing things serve as an index of the constant creation and dissolution of those things, as carried out by the force of time. These high frequency stages of creation and annihilation… are not perceived by ordinary men” (4).

    The Kabbalist Zev Ben Shimon Halevi, discussing the illusion of matter, talks about “the eye’s relatively slow time scale that cannot perceive the sequence oscillating between something and nothing which creates the appearance of the book being present” (5).

    If this is correct, just like in the cinema, what we call motion or movement is an illusion; everything is just a series of freeze-frames. This is possibly the explanation for what is called a quantum leap. Atoms were once thought to be “miniature solar systems, in which negatively charged electrons circle like planets (thus moving) around a positively charged nucleus”. However, “electrons were found to behave quite unlike planets — they kept jumping from one orbit into another without passing through the space between them… a single jump, ignoring space” (6).

    If all this is true then the whole universe, many billions of times a second, is a totality, a single frame, theoretically disconnected from every other moment, while appearing continuous and causally connected. Since we are part of the universe, this must be happening to our own bodies, yet we are completely unaware of this process. It hardly needs saying, but all this is mind-boggling. Our minds cannot cope with such ideas, especially, it would seem, the minds of materialist scientists. How could they seriously maintain their philosophy if they took such ideas fully on board?

    Who or what is creating these billions of single frames? This takes us back to my starting point, Sir James Jeans and the idea of the universe as a great thought. I am led irresistibly to contemplate the unfathomable workings of the Divine Mind. We can only stand in awe of an extraordinary mystery.

Footnotes:

(1) The Mysterious Universe, CUP, 1947, pp136–137

(2) Occult Chemistry, Theosophical Publishing House, 1951, p14

(3) Space-Time and Beyond, Bantam, 1983, p38, p80

(4) Creating the Soul Body, Inner Traditions, 2008, pp75–76

(5) Anatomy of Fate, Penguin, 1995, p161. He is writing, admittedly, after the quantum revolution, but it is fair to assume that he is referring to an ancient tradition.

(6) Arthur Koestler, Janus: a Summing Up, Pan Books, 1979, p247

    This post follows on from a previous one, and also continues the ongoing theme: Time for a New Paradigm.

    Here I am going to highlight the thoughts of the significant new-paradigm scientist, Brian O’Leary. He says that he was once “a typical ‘left-brained’ academic — rationalistic, reductionistic, deterministic, materialistic (who felt he) had the universe and its laws mastered”.

    Then, as a result of an ESP experience, “my hard-earned scientific belief system was irreversibly shaken”. What he had previously considered ‘poppycock’ “turned out to be true” (1).

    Here are his thoughts on the problem facing us all, which echo those of Stanislav Grof in the previous article:

    “In confronting ‘unexplainable’ phenomena, what I learned was that we — scientists and lay people alike — had isolated ourselves in an invisible box of our own making… We had painted ourselves into a conceptual corner that kept us from asking the most basic questions about ourselves and the universe. As a result we had become prisoners of our own limiting beliefs. Science itself had become a religion, with mechanistic materialism as the Supreme Dogma… At the same time I had to acknowledge that the scientific method itself was indeed very powerful. After all, hadn’t it helped create the many useful technologies we then took for granted?

    “(The obvious solution) is that we simply needed to separate the scientific method itself from the package of beliefs that surrounded it, and from which it had become almost indistinguishable. Having done so, we were now free to use this powerful tool to address basic cosmic, as well as mundane, questions. As a result we found more meaning in life, and are now well along in solving our most pressing global problems. By using the scientific method without being bound by a narrow philosophy of science, we have, in more ways than one, entered a new millennium…What we needed was a New Science” (2).

    The way forward is therefore clear. We need to retain the scientific method, but free it from all the philosophical baggage that has been attached to it. Even better, instead of dismissing all paranormal and supernatural phenomena as non-existent, we should enthusiastically use the scientific method to study them.

 

Footnotes:

(1) The Second Coming of Science: An Intimate Report on the New Science, North Atlantic Books, 1992, Foreward Pix.

(2) ibid., p3

    “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.

    That is the opening of a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis by Nobel-prize winner Francis Crick (1) on his “scientific search for the soul” (the subtitle). I often come across this quote in books and talks, usually when the author or speaker wants an example of the extreme lengths that materialist science can go to, or, put less kindly, how ridiculous a supposedly intelligent scientist can sometimes be.

    Recently, however, I’ve come across someone praising him. Here is Steven Pinker: “The feature (neuroscientists) find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it ‘the astonishing hypothesis’ — the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA (personal digital assistant), consciousness is the activity of the brain” (2).

    I hope everyone understands that the last statement is Pinker’s personal belief; I would say his faith, since it is tantamount to a religious statement. It is not science. The fact that most neuroscientists agree does not prove it; it merely indicates the inadequacy of neuroscience to see what is really going on.

    I believe that what Pinker rejects is actually the case. The idea that the brain acts as a reducing valve or filter which limits consciousness is a credible hypothesis mentioned frequently, obviously in literature that Pinker doesn’t read.

    In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley quotes the Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, who suggests that we should take seriously the idea of the French philosopher Henri Bergson: “The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (3). Joseph Campbell quotes the passage and embraces it (4), saying that “each one of us is potentially Mind at Large”.

    The idea of the reducing valve is also called the Transmission Model, following William James. Other relevant names are Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Henri Bergson as noted above, English philosopher F. C. S. Schiller. A highly relevant book is Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (5). Chapter 3 is called ‘The “Transmission” Model of Mind and Body: a Brief History’. Its author Michael Grosso says: “What emerges is a picture, deeply embedded in the historical psyche of an intuition of mind as primordial and transcendent, mind interactively interwoven with and essentially pervading physical nature. It is an intuition at odds with currently prevailing outlooks that lean en masse toward physicalism”, thus Crick, Pinker, and others like them.

    So, it is not just the silly, ignorant public who reject the beliefs of neuroscientists. I hope that these impressive thinkers will be remembered long after Pinker and Crick (apart from his discovery of the structure of DNA) have been forgotten. Crick says: “This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing”. Pinker says that “many people outside the field find (this idea) the most shocking”. As is frequently the case, the public’s intuition is probably more accurate than the conclusions of modern scientists. The hypothesis is astonishing because nobody in their right mind could believe it.

    “The brain is not the mind; it is an organ suitable for connecting a mind to the rest of the universe” (6).

Footnotes:

(1) Simon & Schuster, 1994

(2) The Mystery of Consciousness, Time magazine, January 19th 2007

(3) Vintage Classics, 2004, p10

(4) Myths To Live By, Souvenir Press, 1973, reissued 1991, p263

(5) Edward Kelly and others, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

(6) Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: a Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, HarperOne, 2007, Introduction, Pxi

    The idea of bringing science and religion together has been an ongoing idea of mine for some time. It is all part of the search for a new paradigm, a new scientific and philosophical way of understanding the universe, which may be an essential ingredient in our attempts to save the planet.

    I’ve been invited to give a talk on this theme on June 9th (2019) in Leeds (England). I’ll publish the full transcript nearer the time, but in the coming months, as part of my preparations, I’ll post related material, mainly the stuff from my research that won’t find its way into the talk.

    Creating a synthesis of science and religion would be desirable in itself. But why do I say a reunification, not merely a unification? It’s not just that people in earlier times did not make this distinction, using the term natural philosophy, and that it is only since the Enlightenment that science and religion have been separated. It’s also because ancient cultures had a very sophisticated understanding of scientific issues. Such a synthesis would therefore be a rediscovery of an Ancient Wisdom, which arguably remains more advanced than modern scientific thinking. It would undoubtedly come as a shock to ‘Enlightenment’ scientists that they still haven’t caught up with this Ancient Wisdom.

    Some interesting books on this theme are:

• Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science by Stanislav Grof, as editor (1). In his introduction he describes the problem in detail (by ‘perennial philosophy’ he means the Ancient Wisdom):

    “A tendency to glorify progress and evolution and to look down upon the past as a time of infancy and immaturity is associated with the view that the ideological and cultural differences between East and West are absolute and unbridgeable”. He refers to “the fundamental difference in their dominant world-views and philosophies. Western scientific disciplines have described the universe as an infinitely complex mechanical system of interacting, discrete particles and separate objects. In this context, matter appears to be solid, inert, passive and unconscious; life, consciousness and creative intelligence are seen as insignificant accidents and derivatives of material development. They emerged after billions of years of random mechanical evolution of matter and only in a negligible section of an immense universe.

    “In contrast, the spiritual philosophies of the great ancient and Eastern cultures — or ‘perennial philosophy’ — describe consciousness and creative intelligence as primary attributes of existence, both transcendent and immanent in the phenomenal world. Western science recognizes as real only those phenomena that can be objectively observed and measured; perennial philosophy acknowledges an entire hierarchy of realities — some of them manifest, others hidden under ordinary circumstances and directly observable only in certain special states of consciousness.

    “Materialistic science and perennial philosophy differ most in their images of human nature. Western science portrays human beings as highly developed animals and thinking biological machines who have a fleeting, insignificant role in the overall scheme of things. Perennial philosophy sees humans as essentially commensurate with the entire universe and ultimately divine”.

    Grof later asks whether Western science and perennial wisdom could be “reconciled in a way that would combine their advantages and avoid their drawbacks. Since it is not possible to change the ancient and perennial, any attempt at such synthesis must involve changes in the philosophy of Western science. But is it possible to change the basic assumptions of science while preserving its formidable pragmatic powers? Do not the everyday triumphs of mechanistic science constitute a clear proof of the accuracy of its basic philosophical assumptions?”

• Creating the Soul Body: the Sacred Science of Immortality by Robert E. Cox (2). The connection with my theme may not be apparent from the title, but this is his opening statement: “This book is devoted to a re-evaluation of ancient systems of religious-mythological thought and their relevance to our modern systems of scientific thought. Throughout this book runs this theme: The ancients were much more intelligent than we have supposed them to be. In particular, the chapters that follow propose that many ancient cultures once shared a genuine spiritual science, a science of consciousness, which in certain ways rivals and even surpasses the most advanced physical theories of today”.
• The Snake and the Rope: Problems in Western Science Resolved by Occult Science by Edi D. Bilimoria (3).

    Quantum physics is the most important factor in this reunification of science and religion. Bilimoria calls it the crown jewel of modern physics (I would also say of modern science). My previous posts on quantum physics (4) are therefore relevant to this ongoing theme of reunification. Bilimoria also says that it was predated by occult science for centuries.

    I’ll be returning to all these themes in future posts.

 

Footnotes:

(1) State University of New York Press, Albany, 1984

(2) Inner Traditions, 2008

(3) Theosophical Publishing House, 2006

(4) click on part 1, and part 2

 

    I have recently been reading Kathleen Raine’s selection of poetry by Shelley. In her introduction, she says: “Inspiration, of the kind claimed for, or by, such poets, from Plato to Yeats… seems again, as we learn more of the human psyche, credible. There are regions of the mind which seem possessed of knowledge beyond anything we may have acquired by study or experience” (1). This expresses perfectly the idea of the title of this series; the scientific method can take us only so far, as we journey in the worlds of psyche and spirit.

 

Footnote:

(1) Penguin, 1973, p8

Change is now, change is now                                                                                                                                                              Things that seem to be solid are not.

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    It’s amazing how sometimes a poet, or even a rock star, can say in just a few words what others would take several pages to say. That’s what seemed to happen here when Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of the Byrds summed up in two simple lines of a song the profound implications of the discoveries of quantum physics for our understanding of the nature of reality (1). They were suggesting that the advent of quantum physics would provoke a revolution in our consciousness, and social attitudes; the last line of the song is “keep in harmony with love’s sweet plan”. This doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

    This article follows on from the introduction to this series, and it would be helpful if readers were familiar with it. In a nutshell my view is that, in order for humanity to move forward in the fields of cosmology, science and metaphysics, we need a reunification of science and religion, a synthesis of the best of both. That was how it was in the past, when people spoke of natural philosophy, until the two were driven apart by so-called ‘Enlightenment’ science with its rejection of religion. It is often said nowadays that the two are irreconcilable. In order to heal the rift, we need better religion and better science.

    Quantum physics is at the cutting edge of new-paradigm thinking, and is therefore leading the way to this reunification. I’ll outline how this came about in this and subsequent articles.

    The world view of quantum physicists defies common sense, and seems absurd to the layperson. “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”, and “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”, are quotes attributed to physicists Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman (although these may not be the exact wordings). Despite this, however, in the opinion of the scientists involved, “quantum theory has been the deepest description that physics has available of the nature of reality”(2). “Quantum mechanics is the theory of physics. It has explained successfully everything from subatomic particles to stellar phenomena. There never has been a more successful theory. It has no competition” (3). It underlies nearly all of modern science and technology, governing the behaviour of transistors and integrated circuits, the essential components of electronic devices.

    The primary finding of quantum physics was that solid objects are not real, at least not in the way they seem to us. This discovery was the culmination of the classical physicists’ relentless search for the ultimate building blocks of matter. At one point these were thought to be atoms, but it was then discovered that atoms were made up of smaller particles. So far so good. Unfortunately, at this point problems started to develop, as further research suggested that these particles were not material at all, but in a sense were only ‘probability waves’ with ‘tendencies to exist’. Then, add to this the fact that they do not remain in existence, but are born, collide with each other and die, all this within an extraordinarily short time span, and we can understand, although we cannot see, that matter is not what it seems.

    Here are some examples of physicists and one science writer explaining at greater length what the Byrds said so succinctly:

    Fritjof Capra: “…the whole question of the division of matter appeared in a new light. When two particles collide with high energies, they generally break into pieces, but these pieces are not smaller than the original particles. They are again particles of the same kind, and are created out of the energy of motion (‘kinetic energy’) involved in the collision process… We can divide matter again and again, but we never obtain smaller pieces… The subatomic particles are thus destructible and indestructible at the same time.

    “This state of affairs is bound to remain paradoxical as long as we adopt the static view of composite ‘objects’ consisting of ‘basic building blocks’. Only when the dynamic, relativistic view is adopted does the paradox disappear. The particles are then seen as dynamic patterns or processes, which involve a certain amount of energy appearing to us as their mass”.

    “All particles can be transmuted into other particles; they can be created from energy and can vanish into energy. In this world, classical concepts like elementary particle, material substance, or isolated object, have lost their meaning. The whole universe appears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns”(4).

    Fred Alan Wolf: “We might say that God’s will is exercised in the world of the qwiff… It is a causal world of exact mathematical accuracy, but there is no matter present” (5).

    Danah Zohar: “Niels Bohr, and Heisenberg himself, argued that there is no clear, fixed, underlying ‘something’ to our daily existence that can ever be known. Everything about reality is and remains a matter of probabilities”(6).

    Gary Zukav: “A dust particle is a thing, an object. A subatomic particle cannot be pictured as a thing. Therefore we must abandon the idea of a subatomic particle as an object” (his italics).

    “The photon is a relationship between two observables. This is a long, long way from the building-brick concept of elementary particles” (his italics).

    “ ‘Matter’ is actually a series of patterns out of focus. The search for the ultimate stuff of the universe ends with the discovery that there isn’t any. If there is any ultimate stuff of the universe, it is pure energy, but subatomic particles are not ‘made of’ energy, they are energy… What we have been calling matter constantly is being created, annihilated and created again. This happens… literally, out of nowhere” (7).

    (That matter was merely a form of energy had been revealed just before the quantum revolution by Einstein in his famous equation E=mc².)

    I’ll move on to the spiritual implications of all this in a later article.

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Footnotes:

(1) The song Change Is Now is on the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Online versions of the lyrics say ‘seemed’. Listening to the track for years, I’ve always heard ‘seem’ and, listening to it again, I still hear ‘seem’. It doesn’t make any difference to the meaning.

(2) BBC Radio 4, Quantum, December 1st 1999

(3) Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Fontana, 1980, p217

(4) The Tao of Physics, Fontana, 1976, p82, p83

(5) Taking the Quantum Leap, Harper and Row, 1989, p249

(6) The Quantum Self, Flamingo, 1991, p11

(7) as (3), p57, p94 and p212

    In the three previous posts I have focused on individual poets. Here I am going to put together a few brief lines from others, the theme of which will be a spiritual perspective on nature.

    Materialist science claims that the physical universe is merely an accidental collocation of atoms, that life and consciousness are extremely unlikely accidents of nature and evolution; humanity is therefore a meaningless blip in an essentially dead mechanism. Spiritual teachings claim, on the contrary, that the universe is actually a manifestation of consciousness, nothing but life and consciousness; it is in fact the body of God, and there is therefore no such thing as inorganic matter.

    Here are three poets who seem to agree with this perspective:

• William Blake: “Every rock is deluged with Deity”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”
• Alexander Pope: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is and God the soul”

(All three are quoted together by George Trevelyan, A Vision of the Aquarian Age, Gateway Books, 1994, p7.)

They might be wrong, but I know whose version I prefer!

 

“The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. it’s part of the human condition”.        (the late) Christopher Hitchens

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    I was first made aware of this quote in a recent article on Medium.com by Erman Misirlisoy PhD (1). I’m not sure of the source, but it is widely repeated on the internet, so I assume it’s genuine.

    It’s hard to argue against the challenge that Hitchens set himself; we should oppose superstition whenever it occurs, as Misirlisoy says, when we wrongly identify the cause of a particular effect. If something is wrong, it should be challenged. There is an immediate problem, however; who gets to define what is superstition, thus what is wrong? Misirlisoy continues, “…especially when we invoke a supernatural belief or myth in that estimation”. Christopher Hitchens was well known for his fervent atheism, and was indeed a member of the Four Horsemen (of the Non-Apocalypse). Should we let people like him decide what is and what is not superstition?

    Are all supernatural beliefs superstition, or only some of them? Is belief in God a superstition? Are the various types of extrasensory perception — telepathy, remote viewing, psychokinesis, and so on — superstition? Some continue to say so, for example Richard Dawkins, despite the impressive scientific evidence piling up (2). Is a belief that consciousness can exist independently of the body — out-of-body experiences, life after death — a superstition?

    In the past it would have been considered superstition to believe that “trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers”. Now, in The Hidden Life of Trees (3) Peter Wohlleben “draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries” which suggest exactly that. (The quotes are taken from the back cover.)

    Is it a superstition that an ill person can be cured by a homeopathic treatment? Again, some would say so; there have even been demonstrations outside chemists which sell homeopathic remedies, based on the claim that there is no evidence that they work. Is homeopathy in error, or is it just something that makes the modern ‘scientific’ thinker feel uncomfortable?

    I could go on, but I hope the main point is clear. It is important to oppose actual superstition, as long as we are clear what that is. We should not confuse ridding ourselves of superstition with a dismissal of anything that appears mysterious or supernatural to modern science, thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Getting rid of superstition should not be done under the umbrella of the philosophy of scientific materialism. We would be missing out on a lot, and would be holding humanity back in its ongoing search for knowledge.

 

Footnotes:

(1) https://medium.com/@ermanmisirlisoy/your-brains-battle-between-science-and-superstition-8ff37742682f

(2) see, for example, the works of Dean Radin

(3) William Collins, 2017

    Materialist science claims that the physical universe is merely an accidental collocation of atoms, that life and consciousness are extremely unlikely accidents of nature and evolution; humanity is therefore a meaningless blip in an essentially dead mechanism. Spiritual teachings claim, on the contrary, that the universe is actually a manifestation of consciousness, nothing but life and consciousness; it is in fact the body of God, and there is therefore no such thing as inorganic matter.

    Sometimes poets agree with this perspective (1):

• William Blake: “Every rock is deluged with Deity”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”
• Alexander Pope: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is and God the soul”

    It is therefore interesting to discover scientists, and others with a scientific background, who think along these lines. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which claims that the Earth is a living organism, is well known (2). Peter Russell has followed in his footsteps, and I have referred to his book The Awakening Earth (3) in previous articles. This was first published in 1982, and was republished the following year with the title The Global Brain (4). The suggestion is therefore that the Earth is intelligent.

    Can we go further and say that the universe is intelligent? Interestingly, The Intelligent Universe is the title of two books, one by David Foster (5), a highly qualified scientist, specialising in cybernetics, whose work is related to that of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, thus a spiritual perspective, and another by Sir Fred Hoyle (6), who is usually described as an atheist, or agnostic.

    Hoyle is a controversial figure, famous for being a critic of the Big Bang theory, advocating instead the Steady State theory, which has now been discredited, at least according to conventional modern cosmologists (that would be a debate for another time). One could conclude, therefore, that he is a marginal figure whose views should not be taken seriously. I think that would be a mistake (7). I cannot go into great detail here, but in this book he claims that life could not have started by random processes, thus not by chance. He is also a savage critic of Darwinism: “How has the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection managed, for upwards of a century, to fasten itself like a superstition on so-called enlightened opinion? Why is the theory still defended so vigorously? Personally, I have little doubt that scientific historians of the future will find it mysterious that a theory which could be seen to be unworkable came to be so widely believed” (p25).

    Here are two quotes from his final three chapters:

• “The origin of the Universe… requires an intelligence” (p189).
• discussing the problem of the “vast unlikelihood that life, even on a cosmic scale, arose from non-living matter”: “There is no shortage of scientists who will shout this problem down, but in my opinion their protestations are more dogmatic than scientific. By dogmatic I mean that they are arguing from ideas that are pre-set to begin with, instead of allowing their thinking to develop and even to change drastically as new facts become available. The pre-set state of mind… leads to all manner of excuses and deceptions when life’s complexity comes up for explanation” (p242–3).

    In other words, these scientists’ commitment to materialist explanations leads to some dubious arguments.

    The epigram to David Foster’s book quotes Einstein describing a scientist: “His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement of 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”. I have heard Einstein described as an atheist (by Richard Dawkins, perhaps not a reliable source). Is he not talking here about the Divine Mind?

    Foster’s second chapter begins with a definition of the theory of the intelligent universe: “The total universe, inclusive of all aspects of matter and mind, shows a construction virtually indistinguishable from that of an electronic computer, and all its workings are in the nature of intelligent data processing. Thus, for brevity, we describe it as an ‘Intelligent Universe’ ”.

    He continues: “The central idea is that the whole universe is simply one vast mind. This is not a new idea, and a similar point of view was stated by Plato over two thousand years ago in his ‘world of ideas’ and more recently in this century by Sir Arthur Eddington when he stated, ‘We begin to suspect that the stuff of the world is mind stuff’ ” (p39).

    So it’s not just the poets who think this. Thank goodness for new-paradigm scientists (and a philosopher of antiquity).

 

Footnotes:

(1) The following three quotes come from A Vision of the Aquarian Age, George Trevelyan, Gateway Books, 1994, p7.

(2) Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979, new edition OUP, 1995

(3) Routledge & Kegan Paul

(4) published by J. P. Tarcher

(5) Abelard, 1975

(6) Michael Joseph Ltd., 1983

(7) He was a Cambridge graduate, a distinguished theoretical physicist, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy, associate member of the American National Academy of Sciences (the Academy’s highest award for non-American scientists), and he was of course knighted for services to science.

    I’ve been a Medium member for over a year, and it’s been very rewarding (and a lot of fun) reading the ideas of others, interesting people I would never have heard of otherwise, debating with them in the responses, and putting out my own thoughts. One thing I’ve noticed is that so many people are passionately working to create a better world, whether from perspectives of politics, ecology, education, philosophy, spirituality, religion, and others. It’s great to know that so many people care!

    That’s the reason I’ve been writing, and I assume that those following me do so because they share, or are at least interested in, my vision for a better world — the ongoing battle against atheism, the philosophy of materialism, and the bad science derived from them. When such ideas dominate, we are led towards a secular society. Secularism, based upon the error that the world would be better off without religion, is therefore another opponent in this battle.

    We do need a credible religion, however! What is currently on offer is unsatisfactory to many people, and for good reason. That is why I am also trying to promote better religion and spirituality because, when ridiculous statements are made, they become easy targets for atheists, and we are led down a dangerous path. Adopting and acting upon a spiritual perspective on life is the single most important thing that any person can do as we struggle to save the planet.

    With that idea in mind, it’s time for a new paradigm. For everyone on the planet to have a spiritual perspective, implying that the planet would be organised and governed from a spiritual perspective, would require a revolution in thinking and politics on a grand scale.

    The philosopher of science and physicist Thomas S. Kuhn is the person who has written in most detail about how something like this might be achieved. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1) described the process of how the world moves from one paradigm to another. Here are some of his chapter headings: The Nature of Normal Science, The Priority of Paradigms, Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories, The Response to Crisis, The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions, Revolutions as Changes of World View, Progress through Revolutions.

    I’ll summarise his argument. A certain scientific or philosophical world view becomes established, and continues for some time because nothing is perceived to contradict it. Then some anomalies (experimental results) begin to appear, which cannot be explained within this paradigm. If this continues and is repeated, then a crisis emerges for the old way of thinking, and new speculative theories begin to be developed, until a vision for a new paradigm emerges. However, there is no simple transition from one world view to the next, for those who are attached to the old paradigm defend it vigorously, and argue strongly against the new ideas. The two paradigms therefore coexist. At some point, however, a critical point is reached when the old paradigm is no longer credible, can no longer be sustained, and is swept away by a revolution. The new paradigm then becomes the accepted world view.

    As I see it, the situation at the current time is that we have reached the point where the two paradigms coexist. The old paradigm of atheism, materialism, has passed its sell-by date, is no longer credible (there are too many anomalies), yet is still vigorously defended by its advocates. At the same time a generation of new-paradigm scientists and others has emerged, and it is only a matter of time before their ideas become the new world view. If it is not 2019, which it probably won’t be, then it is inevitable, if we follow Kuhn’s logic, that it will happen at some point in the future. Let’s do all that we can to accelerate the process!

    Thanks to everyone who is following me on Medium, and a Happy New Year! How about this for a New Year resolution? Immerse yourself in and learn more about new-paradigm thinking, write about it and challenge outdated ideas and expose the errors of the old paradigm. (I’ll be suggesting some important authors in future articles.) The aim is to bring together the best of science, and the best of religion and spirituality, therefore to achieve a reunification of science and religion, a true spiritual science. From better ideas, a better society will follow. Become part of the revolution!

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    By coincidence, as I had the idea for this article, I started reading a book described on its back cover as “a paradigm-smashing chronicle of joyous entanglement”. One of the new-paradigm ideas that I have previously written about at length is the Earth as a living superorganism. This book offers evidence which contributes to that theme. It is The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2), who “makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending danger”. (These are further notes from the back cover.) The book is said to be an ‘International Bestseller’. I know that this claim is often made by publishers but, if true in this case, it just goes to show how ready the public are for new-paradigm thinking. Long may this continue.

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    I have written a song called Time for a New Paradigm, which is the last song in a cycle of the same name. You can see me play it on my Youtube channel grahampemberton1, click here.

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Footnotes:

(1) University of Chicago Press, third edition 1996

(2) translated by Jane Billinghurst, William Collins, 2017