Spiritual awakening: the convergence of physics, psychology, and metaphysics

Convergence

Science is a belief system. It’s a successful one, but a belief system anyway. However, the direction of physics, psychology, and metaphysics seem to be converging on an understanding of what is variously described in these disparate disciplines as a unified field, the collective consciousness (or collective unconscious), the Oneness, the Totality, the Ground of Being, the Absolute or ‘God’. Just choose your term.

The question this points to is why a belief system steeped in the rigors of the scientific method, with the prevailing need for its “laws” and “theories” to produce verifiable predictions that will produce ‘objective’ and repeatable results, should aim essentially towards the same conclusion, albeit in different terms, as the much more “spongy” social sciences and metaphysics do: that the whole (or “All”) is One, and in it “we live, move and have our being “. (Acts 17:28)

Two conclusions seem obvious: first, that we simply have a basic affinity, despite our egoic and inherently dualistic self-awareness, with the numeral ‘one’ as the most basic unit of calculation (the concept of “null” or “zero” came up a lot. later); or that we really are integral parts of an undivided “whole” or universal field. So, therefore, let’s fast-forward to examine the latter for an explanation as to why scientists, psychologists, and philosophers seem to be scratching the surface of the same thing.

The resistance

Perhaps the most influential book of the last hundred years looking at what modern science “is” and how the process (and progress) of modern science “works” is “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn’s basic thesis is that science comes to accept a “paradigm” that explains and accounts for the observations that scientists have made up to that point and the experiments they have carried out to verify their theories about “what” is “what” . Thus, a paradigm is essentially the predominant “belief system” within the larger “belief system” of science.

Kuhn claims that a dominant paradigm will remain rigid until someone notices an “anomaly” or “result” that paradigmatic theory cannot and cannot explain, even hypothetically. At that point, and quite often it is the same person who detects the anomaly for the first time, some theorist comes up with a new theory or belief system that can and does explain the ‘results’ that the previous paradigm could not.

The “ordinary scientists” in lab coats, those charged with “embodying” the older scientific paradigm and determining its complexities, rather than sweeping it away with a theoretical flourish, are more typically opposed and suspicious of the new paradigm at first. However, over time, as the new paradigm is understood and tested, and its predictions are shown to be experimentally correct, both leading and leading scientists will come to a consensus in favor of it. The new “theory” or “belief system” is gradually adopted and the old theory falls down the scientific path when a “new paradigm” is born. A good example of this process (and one used, unsurprisingly, by Kuhn himself) is how Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newton’s “classical” theories of optics, motion, and gravity.

Lord Kelvin wrongly predicted that only a few clouds remained on the horizon of physics at the dawn of the 20th century. Five years later, a young Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein would once again write physics textbooks when, in his annus mirabulus By 1905, he published three ‘major papers (and two’ minor ‘papers) that fundamentally changed the direction of physics and laid the groundwork for both Einstein’s own theory of relativity and quantum theory.

One problem on Lord Kelvin’s horizon was that Newton’s “classical” theory could not explain the strange anomaly of Mercury’s orbit. Einstein came up with an entirely new paradigm for how we might understand the physics of motion that would explain the Martian orbit anomaly and a host of other troublesome difficulties. Einstein did not discover the theory of relativity to explain the orbit of Mercury, but he did.

However, the theory of relativity predicted that during a solar eclipse it could be shown that the large mass of the sun actually deflects light from stars whose positions fall within one arc degree from the edge of the eclipsed sun. Most scientists were, as Kuhn points out, skeptical. However, the English physicist Arthur Eddington, one of the few scientists who could and did understand the full importance of relativity, thought that Einstein was right, and in 1919 he organized an expedition to photograph a complete solar eclipse and thus verify the prediction of Einstein. (It was no small professional risk for an Englishman to be seen as a ‘collaborator’ with a German in the month’s process and after the end of ‘the Great War’).

However, Eddington’s observations tested the theory of relativity and established it as the new paradigm of physics (along with quantum theory, which Einstein also helped develop); however, this did not occur for a full fifteen years after Einstein published his “Special Theory of Relativity” and three years after he published the “General Theory of Relativity.”

The emergency

The problem is that ‘science’ will not accept any evidence for its theories that is not “objective” and “empirical” (that is, supported by data expressible in mathematical terms). Since virtually all spiritual and / or religious experience is inherently “subjective” and “non-empirical” in today’s view of what science is all about, this conveniently excludes scientists, psychologists, and philosophers from speaking a common language. on at least the surface of science. unitive field, consciousness or Absolute that all disciplines are scratching. And, until this general ‘paradigm’ is successfully challenged, by definition all observations from thousands of years of Eastern psychological, physical, and metaphysical experience cannot challenge the paradigms of science.

This is true even where, as in quantum mechanics (which cannot explain why an “observation” is needed to give “reality” and “determine” a quantum event, or how apparently “separate” particles remain “entangled” between yes even at monumental distances), theoretical research calls for explanations that eastern “inner scientists” discovered millennia ago. Thus, (as Einstein pointed out) “Science without religion [remains] blind while religion without science [remains] sword.”

However, it seems that the “Chinese wall between the objective and the subjective, between the empirical and the intuitive, between the East and the West, is slowly giving way and that the campaign for finally the western sciences of the mind to consider the invaluable. of the Eastern traditions are succeeding.The cooperative work of Western scientists with meditation practitioners of the Eastern wisdom traditions, using increasingly sophisticated instruments (both the highly trained Eastern “brain” and the powerful technical “force” western), promises to do for the study of consciousness and understanding of our ‘inner’ landscape what Galileo’s telescope did for the study of physics and our understanding of our ‘outer reality’, despite the time it may take a truly East-West, physical and metaphysical paradigm ‘to emerge.