Old Questions, New Answers

Image titled "Railway To Nowhere Land" used be permission of KM Cheng, Hong Kong. Click on photo to see KM's full Flickr photostream.

There’s nothing like a little adversity to rid us of the illusions and false concepts we’ve built up in our lives.

The challenge of unemployment has been having this effect in my life.  Many of the “answers” I adopted as truths have evaporated like the morning fog under the harsh light of adversity.  In fact, many of the questions that led me to those “answers” have also been revealed as wrong – they start from false assumptions and consequently lead the mind down blind alleys to dead-end conclusions.

This has been a difficult process for me – all change is – but over time this humbling experience has also become liberating.  Old assumptions and expectations have been cleared away, leaving behind a less burdened space.  The concepts I’ve accepted as “mature” have not held up under the test of experience.  The questions that led to those concepts have similarly needed to be dismissed.

And so, in order to move forward, I’ve found it necessary to return to the more important questions, the one’s that still remain valid: the questions of the child.

At that time, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?”

He called a little child and had him stand among them.  And he said, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

– Matthew 18:1-4 (NIV)

Why?

Why is the universe the way it is?  Why does it work the way it does?  Where did it come from, and where is it going?  What is our role and purpose in it?  Why are we here?  In spite of my family’s current financial predicament, these are some of the questions that keep demanding my attention.

I was raised during the ’60’s and ’70’s in small town America, so I learned two diametrically opposed answers to these questions: the theories of science from my public school and the faith of religion from my Christian church.  As a maturing teenager, the concepts of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and other great scientific minds seemed more plausible than the accounts of Genesis and Exodus offered by Christian orthodoxy.  After all, they were basing teir conclusions on experimental results, and our modern technology was proof that they were correct.

However, as middle-aged man I began to question the cold, harsh scientific explanations and returned to my religious training.  Initially, this may have been for self-assuring reasons – I wanted to believe there was something more following death for myself, my family and friends.  I was hoping for a meaning to our lives.  Fortunately, I quickly experienced numerous occurrences of a larger intelligence working behind the scenes in my life, which I identified as God.  This personal experience led me to the undeniable, but unprovable conclusion that there is a Spirit at work in the universe.

For the past several years I’ve tried to reconcile these two opposing viewpoints into my own personal unified theory of the universe.  This has proved to be one of the greatest false questions in my life.  ultimately, both science and religion are belief systems.  the theories of science are never truly proven.  Teams of scientists devise elaborate experiments to try to disprove a hypothesis; those theories that can’t be dis-proven after repeated attempts are accepted as “true” until they either fail in a future experiment or are replace with a “better” theory.  That scientific theory can’t be directly proven, and is therefore really a belief, is a distinction that’s often forgotten, even by many scientists.

Religion, to its credit, makes no such claims.  You must have faith, we are told,  in order to accept its teachings and benefits.  However, even a casual observation of a typical Sunday service leads me to the conclusion that the accumulated teachings of 2000 years of religious saints, teachers and philosophers has done little to open the spiritual path for the vast majority of seekers.  Religion lacks a means of testing and improvement that is inherent in the scientific method.  Personal experience is usually met with the same sense of distrust from religious seekers as the scientific community.

The Convergence

A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.  – Albert Einstein

The holy grail of scientific inquiry for the past half-century has been the “unified theory,” one grand equation that will account for all four major forces in the study in physics.  One of the biggest sticking points has been quantum mechanics – the study of the sub-atomic universe.  We learned about the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up atoms in grade school.  However, scientists have discovered that the small particles that make up everything in the observable universe don’t behave at all as expected.  They may not even be particles at all, since they exhibit properties of both particles and waves.

According to the Heizenburg Uncertainty Principle, an underlying tenet of quantum mechanics, it’s impossible to know all the variables associated with a particle.  This isn’t a statement about the limits of modern scientific detection methods; it’s a description of the nature of the system that quantum mechanics equations describe.  It is impossible to accurately determine both an electron’s position and velocity.  Only one variable can be determined at a time.  Taken to its limit, the uncertainty principle indicates that an electron of known velocity could be anywhere in the universe.  Or nowhere.  Or even two places at once.

From there, it gets even stranger.  Wes Hopper, who writes the Daily Gratitude Blog, wrote a fascinating article titled “Science, Spirituality and Life After Death” summarizing some of the new scientific findings triggered by the study of quantum mechanics that don’t fit with the current “materialism” theory prevalent in science today.  Go ahead and read it now (by clicking on the link) – I’ll wait.

In her book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, Lynne McTaggart also describes the work of Jahn and Nelson at the Princeton University Global Consciousness Project, as well as the work of scientific explorers in fields ranging from biology and medicine to energy and aerospace.  All of the investigators profiled started out firmly rooted in the scientific viewpoint, but then stumbled on experimental results that didn’t fit with current scientific tenets.  Instead of rejecting the findings out of hand, they devised rigorous experiments to further test their findings, often risking reputation and career in the process.  Their test results seem to validate many claims about individual- and group-consciousness, ESP, alternative medicine, and faith-healing which have been traditionally rejected and ignored by the larger scientific community.

We must dare to think “unthinkable” thoughts.  We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.  We must learn to welcome and not fear the voices of dissent.  – J. William Fulbright

McTaggart draws some amazing conclusions based on the work of these scientists:

• “The communication of the world does not occur in the visible realm of Newton, but in the subatomic world of Werner Heisenburg [and the uncertainty principle].”
• “A substructure underpins the universe that is essentially a recording medium of everything, providing a means of everything to communicate with everything else.”
• “People are indivisible from their environment.  living consciousness is not an isolated entity.  It increases order in the rest of the world.”

She predicts a ‘coming scientific revolution [that will] end dualism in every sense.  Far from destroying God, science for the first time [is] proving His existence – by demonstrating that a higher, collective consciousness [is] out there.  There need no longer be two truths, the truth of science and the truth of religion.  There could be only one unified vision of the world.”

Having personally proven how easy it is to find what I think I should be, I’m now doing my best to maintain an open, inquisitive mind without jumping to conclusions.  Are the seemingly disparate paradigms of science and spirituality starting to converge?  There’s much more to read, study, and explore.  I will continue to update you on my findings, and I invite your input and vigorous debate.

Still, I found it interesting recently that a book I’m reading on meditation and spirituality quoted Albert Einstein, the father of the Theory of Relativity and arguably the world’s most famous scientist:

A human being is part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space.  We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  – Albert Einstein