Stubbornly persistent illusion

Albert Ein­stein, per­haps the most cel­e­brated and rec­og­nized scientist/philosopher, said once, “Peo­ple like us, who believe in physics, know that the dis­tinc­tion between past, present, and future is only a stub­bornly per­sis­tent illusion.”

Space and time are so ele­men­tary to the aver­age human’s every­day expe­ri­ence that the con­cept of space and time not being ‘fixed’ and ‘mutu­ally sep­a­rate’ is sim­ply beyond our per­cep­tion of things. Indeed, why else we have clocks that mea­sure fixed time units, peo­ple may ask, and again, we can clearly see space is space, and time is time — even kids know that. For this rea­son most of us con­tinue to relate to the old, in sci­ence often called ‘New­ton­ian model’ of the uni­verse based on a fixed, expe­ri­ence­able 3D uni­verse. Such a uni­verse is made up of solid par­ti­cles exist­ing under a lin­ear space-time con­tin­uum of events. Lin­ear con­tin­uum says event A is fol­lowed by an event B, then B fol­lowed by C, etc. and through their occur­rence in space we expe­ri­ence the con­cept of time. All this hap­pens before our eyes despite the fact this the­ory was found to be sub­stan­tially inad­e­quate even in the early 20th century.

Albert Ein­stein, per­haps the most cel­e­brated and rec­og­nized scientist/philosopher, said once, “Peo­ple like us, who believe in physics, know that the dis­tinc­tion between past, present, and future is only a stub­bornly per­sis­tent illu­sion.” Physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing used this quote in his books to fur­ther observe and under­line this obdu­rate ten­dency in humans. It seems our mind is used to oper­ate within this illu­sion (per­haps it even cre­ates it) and it’s hard to break free. But what hap­pens if we re-examine it? Let’s try.

Energy and mat­ter are interchangeable

Firstly, our per­cep­tion of mat­ter change. Einstein’s the­ory of rel­a­tiv­ity pos­tu­lated that energy and mat­ter are inter­change­able in accor­dance with his famous for­mula of E=mc². Mat­ter could be con­sid­ered as ‘slowed down’ or crys­tallised ‘energy’ and as such the human body, and the out­side world as well, are noth­ing more than a com­plex ‘energy field’. To express this idea we rewrite the Einstein’s for­mula as m=E/c², sug­gest­ing that mat­ter orig­i­nates from energy and is ‘slowed down’ by the square of speed of light. Accord­ing to sci­ence it’s the high­est pos­si­ble speed in the observ­able universe.

This insight pro­vides a mind­frame enabling us to begin to under­stand the older eso­teric con­cepts which say that the observ­able uni­verse (includ­ing the human body) is made up of multi-dimensional energy fields. It also pro­vides a sci­en­tific set­ting to the notion of human energy field as well, in pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture often called halos, or auras. It draws a bet­ter back­ground to the wide­spread redis­cov­ery and favourable accep­tance of many new age con­cepts of a holis­tic world­view in which seem­ingly sep­a­rate ele­ments are inter­con­nected, includ­ing our being, envi­ron­ment, minds and bod­ies of oth­ers and every­thing else.

Quan­tum physics

Quan­tum physics is at the cut­ting edge of West­ern sci­ence and in many regards goes far beyond Einstein’s the­ory of rel­a­tiv­ity. What’s grip­ping about quan­tum physics is that the orig­i­nal idea that ignited it — the pur­suit of the ele­men­tary par­ti­cles at a sub­atomic level — has become almost mean­ing­less with the dis­cov­ery that the uni­verse appears to be an undi­vided whole in a con­stant state of dynamic flux.

Like Einstein’s the­ory of rel­a­tiv­ity, quan­tum physics dis­cov­ers the uni­verse to be a sin­gle, enor­mous field of energy in which what we call mat­ter is just a ‘slowed down’ form of energy. Quan­tum physics has also dis­cov­ered that matter/energy does not exist with any cer­tainty in def­i­nite places (even a notion of ‘place’ loses its mean­ing in quan­tum physics), but rather shows ‘ten­den­cies’ to exist. That’s a con­cept known as ‘uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple’, which is often stated this way: the mea­sure­ment of posi­tion nec­es­sar­ily dis­turbs (a particle’s) momen­tum, and vice versa.

The most fas­ci­nat­ing truth that comes out of these con­clu­sions, from a mul­ti­tude of exper­i­ments and espe­cially from the uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple is the notion that the exis­tence of an observer is fun­da­men­tal to the exis­tence of the uni­verse. It’s a ground­break­ing con­cept known as ‘the observer effect’. The observer effect says that there is no real­ity until that real­ity is per­ceived. In the uncer­tainty prin­ci­ple it’s the observer who mea­sures the (particle’s) posi­tion and thus influ­ences, dis­turbs its momen­tum. Unques­tion­ably, all this would mean the uni­verse is a con­se­quence of con­scious­ness, for it seems only through con­scious­ness we’re able to expe­ri­ence the very con­cept of our­selves, mea­sure the observ­able uni­verse and our inter­ac­tion with(in) it.

Physi­cist Bar­bara Bren­nan writes in her book ‘The Hands of Light’, “Through exper­i­ments over the past few decades physi­cists have dis­cov­ered mat­ter to be com­pletely muta­ble into other par­ti­cles or energy and vice-versa and on a sub­atomic level, mat­ter does not exist with cer­tainty in def­i­nite places, but rather shows ‘ten­den­cies’ to exist. Quan­tum physics is begin­ning to realise that the uni­verse appears to be a dynamic web of inter­con­nected and insep­a­ra­ble energy pat­terns. If the uni­verse is indeed com­posed of such a web, there is log­i­cally no such thing as a part. This implies we are not sep­a­rated parts of a whole but rather we are the whole.”

Exchang­ing argu­ments with sci­en­tist who still believe in mech­a­nis­tic order and divid­ing of the mat­ter end­lessly, (thus sep­a­rat­ing them­selves from the results of their obser­va­tion despite observer effect), quan­tum physi­cist Dr David Bohm states in his book ‘Whole­ness and the Impli­cate Order’ that “pri­mary phys­i­cal laws can­not be dis­cov­ered by a sci­ence that attempts to break the world into its parts. … What­ever part, ele­ment, or aspect we may abstract in thought, it still enfolds the whole and is there­fore intrin­si­cally related to the total­ity from which it has been abstracted.” These insight­ful con­clu­sions bring forth over­whelm­ing consequences.

Con­sid­er­ing the whole­ness of expe­ri­ence at all lev­els of our per­cep­tion of real­ity, in like man­ner we can pos­tu­late that when it comes to spir­i­tu­al­ity, pri­mary spir­i­tual laws can­not be dis­cov­ered by reli­gions and world­views that attempt to break the exis­tence in parts, namely: heav­ens and hells, below and above, God and man, spir­i­tual and mate­r­ial, sin and virtue, rea­son and love, etc. We need a more com­pre­hen­sive look on real­ity, enriched by all recent dis­cov­er­ies in sci­ence, or a com­plete re-interpretation from a novel standpoint.

Let’s explore what would all these mar­velous ideas and insights mean if super­im­posed onto teach­ings and real­ity of our pre­de­ces­sors, who were not acquainted into knowl­edge we now posses. One thing is almost cer­tain: we’ll enter into an excit­ing, strange at first sight, but immensely beau­ti­ful world of new pos­si­bil­i­ties … and an all new meaning.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 21:36 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with Einstein, quantum physics, stubbornly persistent illusion, Vedas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.