The Edge of Physics, Where Physics & the New Mysticism Meet?

 

The 7^th Avenue Project 3/22/10

“The Edge of Physics”

In recent years, physics theory has gotten way ahead of the evidence. Now, researchers are going to extremes to figure out what’s true and what isn’t. They’ve launched a set of ambitious experiments in some of the most remote places on Earth. Anil Ananthaswamy travelled to these far-flung laboratories and tells us what he saw.

 

The program covers the issues involved because of the widening gulf between theory and evidence in advanced physics.  Host Robert Pollie introduces the program in this way:

 

“Physics theory has pushed so far into the remote past, into the distant reaches of space, and into the deep sub-atomic world that getting any direct clues is just staggeringly hard. You know, it’s like physicists are trying to listen to the very faint whispers of the cosmos. To hear anything at all, you need to do some really extraordinary things. You need to build super-sensitive and powerful instruments, often very big and very expensive, with some insanely sophisticated technology. And you need to put these contraptions in really, really quiet places—I mean, free from various types interference that fill this noisy planet of ours. And that’s why these days you’ll find some of the most advanced physics and the most futuristic laboratories in some of the most out-of-the-way spots on earth. I mean, places like lonely mountain tops and barren deserts, underground caverns and polar ice-caps. Were talking about spectacular science in spectacular places. It is a rarified world that many people never get to see, but my guest today is one of the lucky few. Anil Anathaswamy is a science writer and a consulting editor for New Scientist Magazine. He has spent the last couple of years trotting around the globe visiting these cutting-edge physics experiments and observatories in some of the most remote corners of the earth. He describes his voyages in his new book, The Edge of Physics: A Journey to the Earth’s Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. He’ll tell us what physicists are looking for and what he found.”

 

RP is curious that there may have been some “personal reasons for this journey you took.”

 

AA: “Yes, reading about physics and cosmology has always been important to me.”

 

AA relates how, at the age of 25or so as a grad-student, he bought a book in a used book store in Seattle on Einstein and the universe, which he took back to India.  He had trouble getting to sleep one night, and so he opened it, thinking it would help put him to sleep. However, just the opposite happened—it was so interesting that it kept him up all night.

 

AA: “It was the first intimation that physics did something to me, in terms of the feeling for physics, which you will be hard-pressed to get physicists to acknowledge—to actually say something about their feeling for physics.”

 

AA adds that he’s tried but that most of them keep it to themselves. “I’m sure they feel something, but it’s one of those things scientists don’t like to talk about. But, personally, I’ve always felt something for physics, and I wanted to capture that somehow and, hence, somehow just by traveling to these places, using their inherent silence or just the extraordinariness of the places themselves to weigh in upon the physics itself—that definitely was in the back of my mind. So, it was a pilgrimage of sorts to these places for physics.”

 

RP asks about the novel that got bogged down while he was traveling to these places.

 

AA: “When I said that I wanted to capture the feeling for physics, I think that the initial effort toward that was in the form of a novel. I though that somehow that would be the best way to express what physics might mean, or what cosmology might mean, to a human being, and I got stuck.  I literally could not figure out the structure of the novel. It sort of slammed itself shut on me.”

RP wants to know, “without probing to deeply,” what his game-plan was for exploring physics via fiction.

 

AA: “To explore essentially the kind of feelings that would sort of well-up within me when I was reading physics . . . . I mean, these are terms that put people off. You know, if you mention the word “physics, ” “particle physics,” “relativity” . . . they tend to make a lot of people just turn away, thinking that this is not worth my time. And in the novel my interest was that to somehow couch all those things within the structure of a novel—within story-telling … about people, normal people that were not doing cutting-edge physics, but somehow are affected by the physics. So the intent was to present the conceptual aspects of physics—without being new-agey about it. I have a very hard time with the portrayal of physics when it’s sort of mixed up with … mysticism. They have their place, each one, and at least I don’t see a connection at this point, and most physicists would say that they don’t see any connection at this point. So in a sense, just using what we know of the natural world—and there’s a lot we know, some amazing stuff we know—that itself brings about, at least for me personally, a certain liberation. You know, it just takes the edge off the more mundane aspects of life that seem to bear down upon you. So that’s what I wanted to explore in the novel and, like I said, that’s where I got stuck in the novel and couldn’t figure out. It’s still there—bubbling away—but maybe this research might help toward that.

 

It is interesting that AA uses the same term for the frontiers of physics—“edge” (in the book’s title)—as he does for what physics does for him in relation to mundane reality. I say interesting in the sense that it seems to be a clue to what I detect as an irony in the fact that, on the one hand, AA distances himself in no uncertain terms from the “new-agey” world of what he would see as the mystification of advanced physics, like quantum physics and string theory * and, on the other hand, intimates a almost mystical feeling for the wonders of advanced physics. Like the mystics of old, who sought release from the tyranny of mundane reality in higher realms, for AA the “edge of physics” “takes the edge off the more mundane aspects of life that seem to bear down upon you.”

 

In the light of this ironic element in AA’s comments, consider again the following:

 

“It was the first intimation that physics did something to me, in terms of the feeling for physics, which you will be hard-pressed to get physicists to acknowledge—to actually say something about their feeling for physics.” “I’m sure they feel something, but it’s one of those things scientists don’t like to talk about. But, personally, I’ve always felt something for physics, and I wanted to capture that somehow and, hence, somehow just by traveling to these places, using their inherent silence or just the extraordinariness of the places themselves to weigh in upon the physics itself—that definitely was in the back of my mind. So, it was a pilgrimage of sorts to these places for physics.”

 

At this point in the interview, I’m suspecting, in spite of the epistemological gulf between the two vocations of the theoretical physicist of today and the mystic of old, that there is a secret connection between the two, at least in their deepest motivations: the sense of wonder for the miraculous and the yearning to probe the “secrets of the universe” (as per the title of AA’s book). But at this point (half-way through the interview), it admittedly seemed more like a contradiction that I should chalk up to a bit of cognitive dissonance on AA’s part. Having had first-hand and sustained contact with Indian intellectuals, I have noticed that there are, generally speaking, two kinds. There are the traditionalists, which include the guru-types who are now well known to Westerners, and then there are those who are thoroughly Westernized, some going to extremes to live down the stereotyped notion that all Indians are essentially other-worldly. (And even many early 20^th-century, Western-educated, Indian scientists of fame still retained a spiritual orientation.) So I thought that physicist Anil Anathaswamy was representative of the second group, who may be trying to live down a cultural stereotype. (Indeed, with a South-Indian surname like Anathaswamy, he probably had a lot to live down! Anatha = infinite  + swami = a Hindu A religious teacher, mystic, or yogi.) Little did I know that by the end of the interview I would have evidence enough for my intuitions about the Indian physicist. With less that 10 minutes left, RP did me a favor and went back to the issue of science vs. mysticism.

 

RP: “Now human beings have often sought wisdom in these remote places. And maybe its pure coincidence, but the relationship between these far flung observatories and old-fashioned forms of wisdom-seeking like monasteries and temples—that connection is made in your book from the fact that the place where astronomers are housed on Mt. Wilson is called ‘The Monastery,’ to the fact that the final place you visit in your book in the Indian Himalayas in this amazing valley where another observatory is located at high altitude there’s also a Tibetan monastery.”

 

 AA: “Right. That’s a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery. And I must say that I was always fascinated by this idea that mountaintops seemed to host telescopes and monasteries, but it was when I was standing on this mountaintop in Ladakh in Himalayas where the telescope was and looking across that this 400 year-old monastery that something really struck me:  both the astronomers and the monks need solitude; of a different kind but they both need silence and solitude. The monks need to get away from the distractions of modern life to sort of probe their inner minds, their inner being, and come to the truths that they arrive at. But the astronomers, I realized, also need a kind of quiet, and that’s the silence of the environment. You don’t need pollution, you don’t need radio waves, pollution by television or mobile phone signals, because all these can completely mess up any observations you’re doing. And it made me feel that if we don’t protect these places then we may end up being this population on earth that has no way of building the kinds of instruments, telescopes, and looking deeper into the universe, further back in time. It struck me that we would be like monks who are unable to look deeper into their own minds because they’re distracted by all the noise around them. And if we mess up our environment somehow to the extent that we can’t build these telescopes, or build these instruments, then we’ll be like a planet of people stuck in a very noisy environment unable to look back far enough to figure out our own beginnings.”

 

Now RP asks the $64, 000 question I was hoping he’d get to.

 

RP: “You said that physicists don’t like to get all mystical, and you’re a science writer by background and persuasion as well, but did you get a mystical feeling at any point in these travels?”

 

AA: “There were profound moments—I wouldn’t want to qualify it any other way. There were profound moments … because you are confronted by immensity everywhere you go, in terms of the landscapes, in terms of the instruments, in terms of the questions that are being asked. And these are all enough to make you pause—each one of them . . . . And so, in a sense, all of these trips kept reinforcing that whatever journey we’re on is a profound one, and we have to sort of tread our way carefully and figure it out. To what end I don’t know, but we have to.”

 

______________________________

 

 

The Gypsy Scholar’s Analysis

 

Mystical? Is this a hard-nosed physicist “getting all mystical”? Well, maybe not technically speaking, but damn close! Profound! AA puts life in the metaphor of a great journey (in typically Indian style). And although he won’t exactly cop to a “mystical” feeling as “a feeling for physics,” he does express it as a “profound moment,” which suggests to me something that transcends what he would call “mundane” experience. (Many more forthcoming scientists describe a variety of transcendent moments using different metaphors for scientific insight and discovery, from “peak experience” to an “Ah Ha moment.”) Therefore, if AA isn’t describing a full-blown “mystical experience,” we have at least the seed of one—this transcendent sense of wonder and sublime beauty. I submit that what RP refers to as the “personal reasons for this journey you took” indicate a deeper level of vocation as a searcher for the mysteries of the universe; that Anil Anathaswamy is doing, in his own way, what his Indian ancestors did when they were called swamis or yogis—“the old-fashioned wisdom-seekers.”

That said, it must be admitted that for all the talk of the similarity between the research scientist/physicist and the insearch monk/mystic AA does distinguish between the goal of each; (1) the scientist is looking outward, while the monk is looking inward; (2) the monk sees a divine purpose to existence, but the scientist sees no purpose.  But do these discrepancies make for a mutually exclusive vocation? As to the first discrepancy, it is a tenet of Indian philosophy that the macrocosm and the microcosm are two aspects of the same thing; you go out far enough and you find inwardness or the inner world and vice versa. Both paths, devotedly followed for the sake of truth, lead to the same Ultimate Reality. As far as the second discrepancy is concerned, the rub is again the informing paradigm of materialism-mechanism. In wanting to free itself from the hegemony of the Church’s world-view, 17^th-century science threw out any notion of “purpose” for the universe. Thus the secular “religion” of scientism holds that the universe and evolution are an accident; purposeless, meaningless, and not going anywhere. Advocates for science adopted a strictly materialist position, arguing that everything could be reduced to, and explained by, the interactions of independently existing atoms and the physical forces which acted on them. Once more, everything that was related to human senses was subjective and reduced to “secondary qualities.” (Locke’s “new mechanistic science.”) One can sympathize with the predicament of the early scientists, after what they experienced as Church repression. And one can empathize with modern scientists who are not prepared to state what they see as metaphysical beliefs (never mind the whopping metaphysics of materialism!, or its unexamined epistemological beliefs). Faced with two such irreconcilable worldviews, it appeared that a thinking person would have to choose sides—and many did. But for those who admired science, yet also intuited there must be more to life than the “wiggling and jiggling of atoms,” the apparent intractability of this historical conflict presented something of a personal dilemma. To pursue a spiritual path while simultaneously maintaining a scientific outlook required a kind of philosophical schizophrenia—a kind of cognitive dissonance that one finds in interviews with scientist and science writers today. (Yet, I must confess, if the only option I have is the choice between the agnostic scientists and the true-believing scientists, who drag in the monotheistic “God” as a Deus ex machina; i.e., to explain everything they don’t have an answer for, then I vote for the former!) But that’s exactly my point—there’s not just these two choices; one can also conceive of a universe that has a telos, without dragging in the baggage of religious anthropomorphism and its “God.”) Thus the rift between modern science and mysticism derives mainly from elements of scientism, which holds that subjective experience is meaningless.

Another consideration about AA’s answer to the mystical experience question : the modern hard-and-fast separation between the monk and physical scientist did not exist in early civilizations, like those in Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt. Especially for the ancient “star-gazers” or astronomers, who were of a priestly caste. They were also both astronomers and astrologers, a combination that lasted well into the age of science. (And it is being discovered that these ancient priest-astronomers knew a hell of a lot more about the sky, its stars and constellations, than formerly thought, including the discovery of the precession of equinoxes some centuries before the Greek astronomer Hipparchus supposedly first discovered it in the second century BCE. There is evidence that Ancient Egypt prior to the time of Hipparchus (third millennium BCE and probably even before that date) had discovered the precession of equinoxes. This is clear from the precision with which the Pyramids at Giza are aligned to the cardinal points, a precision which could only have been achieved by their alignment with the stars. Also, some buildings in the Karnak temple complex, for instance, were oriented towards the point on the horizon where certain stars rose or set at key times of the year. Added to this, there is a direct relationship in the translation of the Precession numbers into the numbers of degree-minutes-seconds of the angles of inclination of the faces of the pyramids. Then there is the evidence of the Egyptian sky-chart of the “Narmer Plate,” dated ca. 14,000 BCE. Interestingly enough, this topic was being discussed by me on my program a week before the 7^th Ave. Project interview.) Thus, the fact is it wasn’t that the ancient temples and temple-monasteries were eventually transformed into astronomical observatories—they were originally both. (In fact, some of the oldest megalithic sites were places of worship and observatories, such as late Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeological sites of Stonehenge in Britain and New Grange in Ireland, whose huge circular stone structure is estimated to be 5,000 years old The primary axes of both of these monuments seem to have been carefully aligned on a sight-line pointing to the Winter Solstice sunrise at New Grange and the Winter Solstice sunset at Stonehenge.) Could it be that this ancient dual role of priest-astronomer still has some of its archetypal power for the isolated astrophysicist on his or her mountaintop? (And in India, mountaintops are traditionally sacred, for this is where the gods live.)

 

One can’t help but read in between the lines here concerning AA’s denial of the mixing of physics and mysticism—i.e., hard-headed, no-nonsense physics and soft-headed, fuzzy mysticism. Of course, one can certainly understand the qualms that a mainstream physicist might have with “new-agey” mysticism (which is probably for AA of the Eastern variety popularized by Fritjof Capra and, lately, interestingly enough, by another Westernized-thinking East Indian, Deepak Chopra). Yes, while a good argument can be made for a legitimate overlap between the two forms of knowledge, it can taken to extremes by the new-agey school of pop-physics. However, one still detects in AA’s denial a conflict of paradigms instead of the real science vs. pseudo-science argument. What I’m referring to here is the recent phenomenon of the manning of the bulwarks of the materialist-mechanistic citadel of science (which has been the reigning paradigm since the scientific revolution) to prevent the neo-vitalists/animists—the barbarians at the gates—from gaining any legitimate ground. The more liberal mainstream scientists, like AA, are at least willing to grant a duplex world-view, where each has its own exclusive place (with, of course, the insinuation that only the materialists have real knowledge and the non-materialists are throw-backs to the middle ages). And the only reason for this “scientific” attitude is simply ignorance of the real history of “science;” i.e., the exclusion of a third, animist/vitalist world-view in the conflict between the old religious cosmology and the new materialist-mechanistic world-view.  This over-exercise of caution in the face of the shift in the exclusive either/or of science vs. mysticism to a new synthesis of the two is understandable when a scientist’s credentials and reputation are compromised by any hint of endorsement of a non-materialist/mechanistic paradigm, whether “new agey” not. 

I can’t help but wonder whether AA’s attempt to write a novel, a work of fiction, instead of a non-fiction book about the “feeling for physics,” indicates the limitations of his scientific paradigm (the novel would be “the best way to express what physics might mean, or what cosmology might mean, to a human being . . . .” “To explore essentially the kind of feelings that would sort of well-up within me when I was reading physics”). After all, even a man of science can get away with things in a novel that he couldn’t in non-fiction, like the things that are generally anathema to science: “feelings that well-up,” and “meaning.” Once more, when you are engaged in “story-telling,” as AA describes his attempt, you are automatically in the realm of the myth-maker.  So are the scientist and the mystic so far apart? Are some of the researches of today’s physicists and astrophysicists new forms of “old-fashioned forms of wisdom-seeking”?

 (What the mainstream scientists—the same who AA says will not cop to “feeling for physics”—will not tell you is that while at one extreme is fuzzy-headed new-age mysticism at the other is its opposite in the scientific establishment: scientism. Witness the inquisitional way Deepak Chopra is dealt with by the hard-core scientific skeptics (i.e., disciples of scientism) like Michael Shermer on the Larry King show, and how theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, in spite of this best-selling books, is marginalized because the scientific mainstream deems him as too out there with his popularization of superstring theory and “parallel worlds.” It should be pointed out here that theoretical physicists in the 80s, whose theorizing was panned because it went into the realm of mysticism, or at least transcendentalism, such as David Bohm, Nick Herbert, Michael Talbot, and Fred Alan Wolf, were heralding what is now accepted in advanced quantum physics. As an aside here, it is curious that (1) AA claimed that there is no “proof” for string theory. Does he not consider mathematical proof? (2) AA refers to this branch of theoretical physics as just “string theory,” in spite of the fact that for the last decade or so it is more accurately known as “M-theory” (M = membrane). In theoretical physics, M-theory is an extension of string theory in which 11 dimensions are identified.)

RP pointed out that the same remote places where “human beings have often sought wisdom” are now “far flung observatories,” and would chalk it up to “pure coincidence,” if it were not for the fact AA himself makes this connection in his book. This is curious. The connection between “old-fashioned forms of wisdom-seeking monasteries and temples” and scientific observatories is made by the same person who denies any connection between the wisdom-seekers (especially of the new-age variety) and the physicists. AA had stated that his “feeling for physics” was liberating; that it “takes the edge off the more mundane aspects of life that seem to bear down upon you.” 

Therefore, since AA admits that he didn’t get to express what he wanted to with his novel (what’s not generally recognized in the discipline of physics), and since “It’s still there—bubbling away,” the question for the GS is: with Anil Anathaswamy, do we have a closet mystic?  Or, to put it another way, given what he admits about the “feeling for physics” that  “wells-up inside” and the “certain liberation” that physics offers, is there a mystic inside Anil Anathaswamy that is yearning to be liberated?

 

Science and Mysticism

 

I have added this section—call it an Epilogue—since I couldn’t leave this commentary on the interview without broaching a thorny topic that was totally ignored in the questions and answers. Risking the charge of getting bogged down in insignificant details, the GS must call attention that there is the issue of the nature of “mysticism” that is taken for granted in this interview, as if (1) it’s obvious that everybody is familiar with the term and mean the same thing by it and (2) that it’s the opposite of science or scientific approaches to knowledge. In the case of the question posed to the physicist, the answer enforces the assumption about what is “mystical” in the questioner’s mind and just about determines that the answer will be in the negative. In this case, we are left to speculate, if the experience was not “mystical” but instead “profound,” just what is the nature of this “profound” but not “mystical” experience. And, if the experience was nevertheless out-of-the-ordinary for a scientist, who is not willing to go that far in calling it “mystical,” then how far away is “mystical” from a non-mystical “profound” experience?  As if to complicate matters more, we must ask, if “profound” is used to designate an experience uncommon to scientific research, then how far away it is from its original use in the religious idiom. I’m referring to its Latin use in the biblical “De Profundus” of Psalm 130, where it has the sense of an experience of the depths, like the metaphorical depths of the sea (which is not exactly a pleasant experience). Or, along more positive lines, is it “profound” in the way the modern poets used it—like Alfred Tennyson, Charles Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Federico García Lorca.

Thus, what the significance for the scientific adventure (in AA terms), or quest, for “the secrets of the universe” is in this answer depends on what is meant by a “mystical experience.”  Of course, traditionally interpreted (in our monotheistic/Christian cultural background), “mysticism” has the specific meaning of the soul’s devotional union with “God,” or at least an ecstatic experience of the love of “God.” Here the model is the classical Catholic saint-mystics of the later Middle Ages—St Teresa, St Catherine, St John, and St Francis. In this sense of “mystical,” then, we can definitely rule out any correspondence with science, as it is tied to a religious category of experience, which usually has to do with the redemption of the soul. But this is only one of a variety of types of mystical tradition, and perhaps it would be useful to take a few minutes to go over the history and types of mystic traditions.

It is interesting that AA uses the word “secret” in the subtitle of his book on his adventure of physics—“A Journey to the Earth’s Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe”—; interesting because the original meaning of “mystic” had to do with knowing and keeping a secret. I am talking about the great Eleusinian mystery religion of Demeter and Persephone of ancient Greece, ca.1600 BCE to 395 CE (which, was, interestingly enough, discussed at length in my last program the same night as this interview with the physicist). The Eleusinian Mysteries focused on a myth cycle involving Demeter and Persephone, invoking the concept of death, and the resurrection that can come by triumphing over death. The Eleusinian Mysteries remained intact for nearly two millennia, and over that time laid much of the groundwork for myth cycles other mystic faiths would adopt. The candidates for the Mysteries had to prepare for a secret rite that involved a vision of the goddess Persephone or Kore. No one knows the particulars of this, but the initiate was assured immortality. Some modern scholars believe that the Mysteries were intended “to elevate man above the human sphere into the divine and to assure his redemption . . . and so conferring immortality upon him.” Plato, who was supposedly initiated into the Mysteries wrote: “the ultimate design of the Mysteries . . . was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended . . . a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.” The Church Father Hippolytus, writing in the early third century, discloses that “the Athenians, while initiating people into the Eleusinian rites, likewise display to those who are being admitted to the highest grade at these mysteries, the mighty, and marvellous, and most perfect secret suitable for one initiated into the highest mystic truths . . . .” According to Thomas Taylor, the famous 19^th-century English Neo-Platonist: “the dramatic shows of the Lesser Mysteries occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual [spiritual] vision.” Most initiates stopped at the Lesser Mysteries, but some went on to the Greater Mysteries. Some scholars have called the vision bequeathed at the Greater Mysteries the experience of the “mysterium tremendum.” Now the initiate was known as a mystai, which is where we get out word “mystic.” The mystai was also under an oath not to divulge the secret.

So this is the classic sense of “mysticism.”  From this to the Catholic sense of “mysticism” is not a straight road, and the meaning changes as subsequent mystical traditions come and go—the Orphic, the Neoplatonic, the Gnostic, not to mention the perennial Vedic mysticism of India, the Buddhist mysticism of Tibet, South Asia, and Japan, the Taoist mysticism of China, and the Sufi mysticism of the Mid-East. Many mystic faiths, particularly those outside of the monotheistic tradition, make heavy use of myths and symbolism to convey their deeper meaning. Thus, although the Christian-based mysticism, along with the Islamic, is theistic many other traditions are not, such as the ancient philosophical mysticism of the Neoplatonists, the non-theistic mysticism of the Buddhists, and the metaphysical mysticism of higher Vedantic thought, which posits an supreme reality beyond the personal, anthropomorphic G-d.  So we can see that we need to know what is meant when the term “mystical” is thrown at a modern-day scientist.  And if we want to at least grant that the term may have some relevance to a state of consciousness possible in the pursuit of scientific truth—that it isn’t a meaningless question to ask in a scientific context—, then we can at least admit that one doesn’t necessarily have to be knocked off one’s feet by a vision of God Almighty, or one of the members of the Holy Family, in order to have a “mystical experience.”

It should be admitted here—the reason that I called this topic thorny—is that many scholars have despaired in trying to reach a common definition of “mysticism.” Some have said that, fundamentally, the knowledge sought by mystics cannot be communicated with logic or words, and so cannot be transmitted in the same way traditional religion can be passed on. Instead, certain rites or symbols are used to help open an initiate’s consciousness to a new level, acting as a catalyst for their own mystical awakening, rather than directly transmitting information. Thus, given that the standard sense of “mysticism” is over-burdened with Christianized doctrinal baggage and devotional connotations, perhaps it’s time for a general working-man’s definition in order to move this “abnormal” perception closer to the possibility of a rapprochement with the scientific method. The American philosopher and psychologist, William James (brother of the novelist Henry) has helpful list of four characteristics that qualify an experience to be “mystical”: Ineffability, Noetic quality (knowledge), Transiency, Passivity. More recently, Evelyn Underhill’s classic book on mysticism gives this concise, philosophic definition: “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained union in greater or lesser degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”  I think we can, for my purposes here, boil down the description of “mysticism” to the following: (1) The immediate and unmediated consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality (which the theists call “God”). (2) The experience of such communion as described by mystics. (3) A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.

Thus, we may venture a definition of a “mystic” this way: A mystic is essentially a person who pursues a truth or understanding beyond those normally associated with the human experience. A mystic may or may not be initiated into any number of spiritual or religious mysteries, and may or may not have achieved the insight they are pursuing. What links all mystics is the belief in, and pursuit of, a transcendent truth that surpasses exclusively rational understanding or knowing. This kind of definition is neutral enough to begin to square it with the pursuit of scientific truth. Toward this end, we may turn again to William James: “The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim of formula which occasionally sweeps over one.” Yet, even more down to earth is the definition from professor of religion James Carse: “Mystical vision is seeing how extraordinary the ordinary is.”  These kinds of definition take mysticism from the mountaintops of supernatural faith and put it in our own backyards, where we can find William Blake in his: “To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.”  And, who knows, from finding the “mystical experience” right here we even might find it in the physicist’s observatory!

The trouble is, for the physicist, and for the scientist in general, since the 18^th century at least “mysticism,” or “mystical” are used as terms of reproach—subjective, vague, groundless speculation—used as a weapon against any idea or hypothesis that is judged to be beyond the pale of the reigning scientific paradigm, which is, of course, the materialist-mechanistic one. So what if we take, by the same logic, a positive spin on “mystical” and just say that under this category of experience is a spectrum of non-ordinary experiences, ranging from sudden flashes of insight (the “Ah Ha!” experience) to the full-blown experience of a transcendent Reality where some kind of union of subject and object is achieved. (The subject/object dichotomy, or observer and observed, has been a long-standing assumption of science, but has increasingly come under question, especially in quantum physics. Thus, a striking example of how science’s and mysticism’s perceptions of reality intersect concerns the relationship between subject and object. For quantum physics, deciding where one begins and the other ends presents something of a quandary. Here is how physicist-mathematician, John S. Bell, sums up the problem: “The subject-object distinction is indeed at the very root of the unease that many people feel in connection with quantum mechanics. Some such distinction is dictated by the postulates of the theory, but exactly where or when to make it is not prescribed.” Likewise, attempts by mystics to communicate what their spiritual practices have disclosed always result in one of those paradoxical statements for which mystics have become so famous. To give but one example, listen to the way the great 12^th-century Sufi shaykh, Ibn `Arabi, characterizes what he calls the “Reality of realities”: “If you say that this thing is the [temporal] Universe, you are right. If you say that it is God who is eternal, you are right. If you say that it is neither the Universe nor God but is something conveying some additional meaning, you are right. All these views are correct, for it is the whole comprising the eternal and the temporal.”)

If it were objected that I’m trying, at this late stage of the scientific project, to sneak “mysticism” into the back door of the laboratory or observatory, I would remind you that it was there at the beginning, and it came through a dream vision. On the night of November 10, 1619, Rene Descartes had a series of three dreams which not only changed the course of his life as a Catholic and mathematician, but the entire course of Western history. He reports in his diary that in his sleep the “Angel of Truth” appeared to him and, in a blinding revelation like a flash of lightening, revealed a secret which would “lay the foundations of a new method of understanding and a new and marvelous science.” He also reports that “the Angel of Truth came to me and whispered the secret connection between geometry and algebra.” Thus he went on to invent analytical geometry. Descartes wrote: “Without this revelation, our world as we know it, would disappear. There would be no architecture, engineering or science.” This experience resulted in Descartes laying the groundwork for the scientific method. This is mind-boggling, for means that all of our technological, scientific, and medical marvels were discovered because of a “mystical” vision of the Angel of Truth. Yet, the irony is that our scientists dogmatically disavow anything that smacks of the “mystical.” Go figure!  (If it is thought that this just meant that Descartes, Catholic that he was, was a creature of his time, I would point out that the German organic chemist, Kekulé, discovered the structure of benzene, the benzene ring, in 1865. He spoke of the creation of the theory, saying he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail. This is a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros. In Hermeticism and alchemy it is a mystical symbol. Then there’s James Watson's symbolic dream of two intertwined snakes and his correct interpretation of the double helix provided a key to all life. Amazingly, his intuition was so efficient that the double helix was accepted without the verification of one experiment! (The nature of consciousness especially in the areas of vision, memory, and dreams fascinates his colleague, Dr. Francis Crick, who subsequently went into dream research.) Thus I can’t help but make this observation about AA’s denial of the “mystical”: you would think that a budding physicist who holds his early reading Einstein’s Universe so dearly would cautiously avoid anything to do with mysticism with this scientific researches when this same Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”)

So back to the issue of mysticism and science. This freeing up of “mystical experience” from the exclusive property of the dogma of a religious belief-system has the advantage of helping to re-vision this non-ordinary experience in multiple contexts, which can include alternative spiritual realms and even the strictly secular.  If we define “mysticism” as the “technique of union with Reality,” we can see different types of people as “mystics.” Thus, a poet can be a “mystic” in the sense that he or she achieves union with deeper levels (de profundus) of life than other people. A philosopher is a “mystic” when he or she passes beyond thought to direct apprehension of truth. Even the man or woman of action can be a “mystic” when she or he realizes that their actions are part of a greater activity. In the same way, why couldn’t a scientist be a “mystic” when his or her vision mediates an actuality beyond the reach of the senses? So, if each of these different types of people, as opposed to the devotional monk, has  “mystical experience,” they each will interpret it according to their own frame of reference.

However, this doesn’t mean that each of these people will have the same possibility for a mystical experience. Thus for some of the dogmatic adherents to scientism, a mystical experience is not likely, since they are not open to it. This, of course, doesn’t mean that it is impossible for a scientist of the materialist stripe the have a mystical experience; they can still have this mind-set and still be open to the unexpected—still have imagination in tact.

This brings up the question of why there has been such a concerted effort to banish once and for all the “mystical experience” from the pursuit of scientific truth.  Perhaps it’s because the adherents of scientism unconsciously suspect that such an experience would shatter the belief in the materialistic-mechanistic world-view. Then the scientists would have to stop their centuries-old war against the Platonic idealists and neo-vitalists, and admit they were wrong and the idealist-spiritualists and animist-vitalists were right, or at least closer to the truth of the ultimate nature of the universe than anyone else.  This would send them back to the drawing board, and they would have to at least begin to move in the direction of a non-materialist paradigm. (I should clarity here that by idealist-spiritualists and animist-vitalists I mean those that, in one way or another, believe something like ideas are the ultimate building blocks of matter, that consciousness is primary, and that the universe is alive and ensouled.)

Of course, this shocking discovery would for most scientists be intolerable. For one thing, they would have to admit that James Cameron’s (Avatar) fictional vision of the world being a self-aware network-entity called “Eywa” my indeed be true. (Actually Eywa is Gaia, from independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist James Lovelock’s theory. While working as a consultant for NASA in the 60s, Lovelock developed the “Gaia Hypothesis.”) Here, one would think that a physicist like AA, who is so concerned about the pollution of earth’s environment, would not just want to address the immediate causes of environmental degradation, but it’s root cause in the kind of world-view that makes this all possible—the technological materialist-mechanist.  I’m afraid that such an analysis won’t happen in “Big Science.” To “Unlock the Secrets of the Universe” and suddenly find the last thing they’re expecting to find would be too much for most scientists. Not only would the door to the Secrets be unlocked, they’re materialist-mechanist mind-set would come unhinged, and something truly terrible would break through—the ancient Anima Mundi (world soul) and the Ouroboros.

So, what if the big secret behind the universe is not some ultimate physical force? What if it’s more like what a medieval poet-mystic and amateur cosmologist envisioned in his mystical experience?:

 

But my own wings were not enough for this,

Had it not been that then my mind there smote

A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.

Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:

But now was turning my desire and will,

Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

(Paradiso, Canto XXXIII)

 

And speaking of AA’s notion of the journey of life, more particularly, science as an adventurous journey toward truth, Dante also took a journey “to most remote places on Earth” and “travelled to these far-flung” places “and tells us what he saw.” In fact, so “extreme” were these places that he went to hell and back. It has been said that Dante was the first to write an epic of paradise lost and regained. (This was also said of the Persephone story told last week, but from the feminine point of view.)  In the same sense, too many of our scientific elite have lost the sense of wonder (which Plato said was the beginning of real philosophy), that childhood awesome curiosity that got them to go into the vocation of science in the first place. Thus many scientists are lost in the “dark wood” of the materialist-mechanist paradigm, and that vital sense—the sense of wonder—has been lobotomized and must be regained, and with it the direct mystic knowledge of union, of the interconnectedness of all things. This probably means a rebirth on a vast cultural level. To some historians of the religion, what would make this kind of transformation possible is a return to archaic modes of being and perception: 

 

All that is needed is a modern man with a sensibility less closed to the miracle of life; and the experience of renewal would revive for him . . . . Hence the essential importance, in rituals and myths, of anything which can signify the “beginning,” the original, the primordial . . . . –Mircea Eliade

 

Thus, if you’re an astrophysicist, like AA, and want to “look back in time,” this is the deeper impulse to that project—rebirth through the primordial beginning, as in the creation myths and cosmogonies of the ancients. When I say regain the childlike sense of wonder, I don’t mean in a childish way, but is a more sophisticated way; pressed into the service of the project—the cultural adventure—of science.

In the field of science, the last hundred years has wrought a revolution that has been, quite literally, world-shattering. The revolution is spearheaded by quantum physics, and the “world” it shattered was the materialist world which the older classical physics seemed to support. Here is how Werner Heisenberg, one of founders of quantum physics describes it: “Quantum theory has led the physicists far away from the simple materialistic views that prevailed in the natural science of the nineteenth century.” In short, materialism is no longer a scientifically tenable paradigm. And as far as the unconscious fears of scientists concerning the possibility that the animists-vitalists are right, they wouldn’t have to worry about being out of a job. They could pursue their vocation by translating the old animist-vitalist world-view into the scientific concepts of advanced physics and cosmology.

The fact that quantum physics has rendered the materialist paradigm scientifically untenable means that an otherwise insurmountable barrier to a rapprochement between science and religion (at least in its mystical aspect) has been removed. And while quantum physics does not “prove” mystical teachings (as some overly eager—new-age— enthusiasts have claimed), the fundamental reality which it describes is not at all incompatible with the fundamental reality testified to by the mystics.

There is a growing perception among interested laymen and some science writers that advanced physics is trying to address the same issues that concern the mystic, and some modern physicists are now attempting to understand a multiple dimensional reality that, coincidentally, philosophers and mystics’ have attempted to describe for millennia. Thus, physicist David Bohm, speaking of consciousness expressing itself as matter and/or energy, could be completely understood by the mystic, whatever his or her cultural/religious heritage.  Therefore, it is hoped by this writer that the profound cultural/religious heritage of the mystic-seers of Vedic India breakthrough physicist Anil Anathaswamy’s scientism, so he can be comfortable in answering: “Yes, I would say that the experiences I had in the remote Himalayan mountaintops were not only profound but … mystical.”