Groundbreaking scientists in the twentieth century, LeShan writes, recognized that new insights into physical reality required a new concept of wholeness. Max Planck affirms that in modern mechanics: “it is impossible to obtain an adequate version of the laws for which we are looking, unless the physical system is regarded as a whole. According to modern mechanics, each individual particle of the system, in a certain sense, at any one time, exists simultaneously in every part of the space occupied by the system. This simultaneous existence applies not merely to the field of force with which it is surrounded, but also its mass and its charge.”
Einstein explains: “Before Clerk Maxwell, people conceived of physical reality—insofar as it supposed to represent events in nature—as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions [but] after Maxwell they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one in physics since Newton.”
Physicist Werner Heisenberg asserts that: “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.” And physicist Louis de Broglie observes: “In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given in block, and the entire collection of events, successive for each of us which forms the existence of a material particle is represented by a line, the world line of the particle. Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time, which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.”
LeShan finds it striking that neither the mystic nor the modern physicist “can describe his data adequately in the ordinary language of commonsense.” Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer explains: “you know that when a student of physics makes his first acquaintance with the theory of atomic structure and of quanta, he must come to the rather deep and slow notion which has turned out to be the clue to unraveling that whole domain of physical experience. This is the notion of complementarity, which recognizes that the various ways of talking about experience may each have validity, and may each be necessary for the adequate description of the physical world, and yet may stand in mutually exclusive relationship to each other, so that for a situation to which one applies, there may be no consistent possibility of applying the other.”
From her experience as a medium, Mrs. Eileen Garrett says: Awareness becomes concerned with stimuli that occur in a nonsensory field. I have an inner feeling of participating, in a very unified way, with what I observe—by which I mean that I have no sense of any subjective-objective dualism, no sense of I and any other, but a close association with, an immersion in, the phenomena. The ‘phenomena’ are therefore not phenomenal while they are in process; it is only after the event that the conscious mind, seeking to understand the experience in its own analytical way, devises the unity that, after all, is the nature of the supersensory event.
The ‘explanation’ given for precognition in this theory,” she continues, “is that in this metaphysical system pastness, presentness, and futurity do not exist, although sequences of events remain. (That is to say that there are object-object relationships, or sequences, but not subject-object relationships.) The only time is ‘the eternal now.’ Events are, they do not happen, although we may or may not stumble across them.
Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt observes: “When is a man in mere understanding?” I answered, “When he sees one thing separate from another.” “And when is a man above mere understanding?” That I can tell you: “When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.”
Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist (The Viking Press, 1974), 66-85.
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, 4th ed. (Methuen & Co., 1912).
No comments:
Post a Comment