[world-vedic] THE EYE OF SHIVA PT.1

[Guest guest]

It seems easier today than a century ago for man to have a religious

outlook on life. In an apparent paradox, it is the scientific

revolution of the twentieth century that makes this possible. Not so

far back there was a time when it seemed that an iron-bound

deterministic science was about to establish complete dominion over man

and his environment - when the universe was seen as a cosmic machine

functioning according to sets of mathematical equations. The physical

world was seen through the lenses of an engineer, and the mind was

thought to coincide with the brain. All this is now water under the

bridge, and contemporary physicist regards the material world, in

Arthur Eddington's words, "in a more mystical, though no less exact and

practical way." Strangely enough, there is also, in what some call the post-Christian

world, a profound and rising scepticism regarding the dogmas and

theologies of western creeds, although man's religious aspirations are

greater now than they were two or three generations ago. This

coincidence is explosive, and evidence points to the fact that we are

probably standing on a historical watershed - comparable in importance

to the birth of Christianity some two thousand years ago. A new

spiritual vision is beginning to take shape, under the spur of a most

unlikely alliance between the new physics and eastern, rather than

western, philosophies. Few physicists who reach the outer limits of their science can avoid

taking a side glance at the "metaphysical" implications of the recent

revolution: but the surprising fact is that contemporary science seems

to be deliberately turning away from its cultural roots, finding a more

compatible atmosphere in the very different metaphysics of the orient.

It is the startling parallelism between today's physics and the

world-vision of eastern mysticism that becomes an outstanding cultural

phenomenon of times. Furthermore, as Werner Heisenberg remarks, the increasing contribution

of eastern scientists from India, China and Japan, among others,

reinforces this conjunction. Physical science has now become planetary

and draws into its fold an increasing number of non-westerners who find

in its new vision of the universe many elements that are quick to note,

one cannot always distinguish between statements made by eastern

metaphysics based on mystical insight, and the pronouncements of modern

physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical

calculations. The new picture of the universe presented to us by contemporary physics

is baffling. Contrary to classical science, physics now states that the

commonsensical world we live in simply does not exist; all our

impressions of ultimate solid substances are deceptive. The scientific

revolution has shattered our previous notions of physical reality and

natural law. Space, time, energy, matter and causality have all

acquired entirely new meanings. The first item to go was the sharp and absolute separation between

space and time. Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity

have now joined them together into a four-dimension continuum lacking

the Newtonian universal flow of time. Different observers will see

events occurring in different temporal sequences according to their

respective positions and velocities. As the eminent and Nobel

Prize-winning Japanese physicist Hideki Yukama states it, "Here time

resolves itself into the fourth dimension, on a par with space, where

harmony prevails in an eternal state of rest. One may sense something

close to the Oriental outlook." The second item to go was the concept of matter as something

substantial, whose building blocks, the atoms, were considered to be

the ultimate, indivisible constituents of the physical world. Almost

suddenly, the atom was understood to be divisible and made up of

nucleus and particles. Stranger still, particles could be interpreted

as waves as well as granular elements - it made little difference to

the mathematical equations that dealt with them since they are not

substantial things in the commonsensical meaning of the word. Wave

mechanics assert that electrons can be either waves or corpuscles,

giving rise to the Theory of Complementarity, according to which any

physical event can be interpreted in two different frames of reference,

mutually exclusive, yet also complementary. At that microcosmic level,

the objective world of space and time ceases to exist: the mathematical

interpretation of this subatomic world no longer refers to actual

reality but only to potentialities, "probability waves." With Heisenberg's

Principle of Uncertainty (or Indetermination), we now

reach the outer limits of scientific possibilities by doing away with

determinism and causality, in view of the impossibility of determining

simultaneously the position and velocity of a particle - the greater

the precision of the one, the greater the imprecision of the other. The

deeper we penetrate into the microcosmic world, the more difficult, if

not impossible, is direct observation, along with the fact that the

observation itself interferes with the behaviour of the phenomenon. For

instance, let us suppose that an imaginary microscope was able to

magnify an individual electron a hundred thousand million times so as

to make it visible to the human eye. Since an electron is smaller than

a light-wave, the scientist could make it visible only by using

radiation of a shorter wave-length high-frequency gamma rays of radium

that would push it around violently and make an objective study of it

impossible. This amounts to saying that physics can go only so far in its objective

study of nature, and no further: and beyond, there remains a whole

realm of reality that can never be investigated by scientific

observation and experimentation. Physics has to presuppose the

existence of a background that shall remain forever outside the scope

of its investigation. Physics itself is now reduced to statistical

statements and pointer readings; physical laws simply express the

"connectivity" of these pointer readings. To sum up, the world we see and

experience in everyday life is simply a

mirage, an illusion of our perceptions and our brain. All that is

around us, including ourselves, which appears so substantial, is

ultimately nothing but networks of particle waves whirling around at

lightning speed, colliding, rebounding, disintegration in almost total

emptiness. Matter is mostly emptiness, proportionately as void as

intergalactic space, void of anything except occasional dots and spots

and scattered electric charges. For instance, a single atom is already

minute enough: yet, although almost all of its mass is concentrated in

the nucleus, this nucleus itself is a hundred thousand times smaller.

An atom, therefore, is almost completely empty space in which protons

and neutrons whirl around within its confines at speeds up to forty

thousand miles per second-enough to make us dizzy when we understand

that, in the last resort, that is what we and everything physical are

made of. A Victorian scientist thought that he knew clearly what he was talking

about when he mentioned atoms, molecules, matter: he visualised them as

concrete and describable elements. Today's physicist knows that this is

not exactly the case. Science no longer pretends to have anything to

say about the intrinsic nature of the physical world: the atom we

attempted to visualise earlier is, in fact, nothing more than a

"schedule of pointer readings" attached to some unknown background.

Scientific knowledge is all inferential knowledge. Physics presents us

with the symbolic skeleton of the universe, not with an accurate

picture of the universe itself. The one indisputable fact about the universe is human consciousness

which is known to us by direct and immediate self-knowledge. Even

science and actuality of the physical world is, ultimately, a product

of our consciousness. Physics now tends to accept the fact that we have

to restore consciousness to the fundamental position in the universe,

rather than see it simply as a material phenomenon derived from a

particular arrangement of physical molecules, atoms and particles.

Physicists such as Eugene Wigner believe that the formal inclusion of

consciousness in physics could well become an essential feature of any

further advance in our scientific understanding. The mind is the one

element of knowledge that is not limited to pointer readings.

Therefore, only consciousness can provide the necessary background for

all the pointer readings that, in the aggregate, constitute physical

science. This background is mind-stuff and, as Eddington puts it, the "stuff of

the world is mind-stuff." This mind -stuff is not spread out in space

and time: on the contrary, it is space and time that are spun out of

it. Here and there it rises to the level of self-consciousness in human

beings and from those tips of icebergs, floating on the surface of the

world stuff, springs our two-tier intellectual knowledge - direct

knowledge within each thinking individual, and generalised inferential

knowledge which includes our knowledge of the physical world.

Inferential knowledge, however, is only part of a whole and cannot

grasp the whole. Science cannot, regardless of further discoveries,

encroach on the background from which it springs; and our own

consciousness lies in this background. Our task now is to deal with that part of

consciousness that does not

emerge in space and time and is, therefore, not amenable to scientific

analysis - a part that is, perhaps, amenable to the insights of the

religious approach. We are now faced with the central problem of the truth of religion. A

vast number of churches and denominations scattered throughout the

world claim a near-monopoly of spiritual truth with a remarkable lack

of metaphysical humility such as characterises contemporary science. It

has become difficult for any thoughtful person to to any such

claim. All religions are true and false at the same time, in the sense

that they all point toward some ultimate truth; but none of them is

literally and absolutely true. All their myth, dogmas, scriptures and

theologies are merely symbolic and relative interpretations designed to

help the devotee on his spiritual way. But how did this belief in the

possibility of "literal" truth come

about when thousands of years ago already, our much wiser cultural

ancestors quite rightly understood that every form of expression is

purely symbolic? As Origen expressed it in the third century: "Who can

be stupid enough to believe that God, like a gardener, tilled the

fields of Eden and actually planted a tree named the Tree of Life?" In

order to understand it, we must come to grips with the fundamental

dichotomy splitting mankind's higher cultures into two distinct groups

- East and West, the most famous twins in history: the East comprising

Hinduism and Buddhism, along with all the other sects and creeds of the

Far East and their offshoots; the West being largely made up of

Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The East springs mostly from India's

culture heritage, the West from Greek philosophy and the prophetic

tradition of Judaism. The first striking difference is that the West often believes in the

literal truth of its myths, scriptures, dogmas and ideologies, and

often takes their contents as historical facts, very much as the

Victorian physicist thought that his scientific world-picture literally

described the universe as it is. The East, on the other hand, does

nothing of the kind - indeed it has no dogmas at all, sees in all myths

merely useful symbolism and does not care at all about historical fact.

The roots of the pseudo conflict between science and religion,

materialism and spiritualism lies right here and concerns only the

West. No such conflict is possible in the East where all mythologies

are understood to be simply allegoric and symbolic, implying no literal

truth or factual statement whatsoever, and therefore no possibility of

collision with any scientific view of the universe. It does matter a great deal

to the West whether Christ rose bodily from

the dead, multiplied bread loaves, or even existed at all. It does not

matter one whit to the East whether Rama, Shiva or Buddha ever existed;

since their importance is not historical but symbolic. The West has

always attempted to impose dogmatically its conflicting viewpoints

because, imbued with a Biblical, Judaic or Koranic sense of God-given

historical mission and the conviction of having the monopoly of literal

religious truth, it has always attempted to conquer and shape the

world, either by the sword or by scientific knowledge. The apparent

paradox is that the western scientific attitude springs precisely from

this belief in literalness, inherited from medieval scholasticism, from

the intellectual gymnastics of such mental giants as Duns Scotus and

Abelard, who raised the word-symbol to an almost mathematical

precision, and made possible the total independence of the abstract

idea from aesthetic impression. Thought was no longer chained to

subjective emotion and could therefore enter into independent and

objective relationship with the world of nature. The East also expanded

its knowledge but without ever rejecting the mythologies from which it

sprang. It never took those myths to be anything but metaphorical

formulations of higher truths - as projected contents of an unconscious

that was understood and accepted as being closer to ultimate Reality

than conscious thought (waking-consciousness). East and West alike, all

religions attempt to provide for their

devotees a "way": a path toward some form of holiness. Unlike the West,

the East concentrates almost entirely on the Path - the Chinese Tao,

the Buddhist "Noble Eightfold Path" - and underplays the merely

intellectual interpretations that supposedly go with it. Therefore it

does not tread on the secular grounds covered by science. Furthermore,

and this is crucial, it has studied the "way" of internal metamorphosis

pragmatically and undogmatically, with almost clinical thoroughness;

whereas the West, encumbered by dogmas and scriptures, has never

developed a methodical "science" of the "way", based on experimentation

and observation. The "way", of course, is the way of the mystic, for

lack of a better word. Where the mystical impulse, in the West, is

presumed to be a free gift of God's grace imparted to the few, in the

East it is presumed to arise through a form of knowledge and practice

that is, theoretically, at everyone's disposal. END OF PART ONE