Souled

Being a rambling dissertation on the co-existence of science and spirituality


"Within you is the whole universe. You are a microcosm of the macrocosm.”
--Rabbi Shoni Labowitz

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
--T.S. Eliot

This month's issue of Discover magazine is an absolute goldmine. If you're me, at least. Reading about the cutting edge of science--articles such as "Soul Search", "Blowing In The Wind" and "In No Time"--my mind gorged itself on new information, evaluated, and found--pleasantly--that it all reinforced what I had believed already.

If you ask a scientist what time is, or what consciousness is--or even what an atom is--and she's feeling particularly honest, she'll respond "no idea. Next question."
We fool ourselves into thinking we know how things work. The reality is we have not the slightest idea how things work.

Take time, for instance. Einstein was the first person to mess with our idea of time as a constant, inexorable process. Quantum mechanics further buggers things up--so much so that the only way science has been able to unify Einstein's theories with quantum mechanics is to discard the whole idea of time, as if it didn't exist.

To which there are a whole lot of people, following a great many spiritual and philosophical traditions, saying, "well, duh."

I've long known in my gut that there's such a thing as a soul, that all souls are one, and that time is an illusion. I can claim no scientific evidence for any of these assertions...yet. According to "Soul Search", the amount of evidence for a "soul" depends on what you'd call "evidence". [Ken intrudes: the same can be said about the existence of a god or gods, incidentally. Some people see evidence everywhere; others don't see a shred of evidence. That's not a coincidence, at least to me. In my system of belief, all souls are parts of God. If that word "God" offends your sensibilities, you're more than free to substitute "Life", or "the Universe".]

While there is no rigid scientific quantification of a soul, there is a growing body of circumstantial evidence that something exists within us besides our minds. Witness near death experiences: people categorized brain-dead and subsequently revived have reported a vast array of sensory and mental experiences, often life-changing. These go well beyond the famous "tunnel/white light" phenomena that could be explained as the effect of some final neurons firing. How is it so many people report observing their bodies from above, and being aware of events in the room--or even beyond--while they were supposedly "dead"? Why do so many people recognize their dead relatives, or experience a "life-review", a sort of visual riffling of experiential cards? Science suggests this sort of thing is clearly impossible. Yet it persists.

Many religions and philosophies incorporate the idea that all souls are one. Christianity indirectly expresses this in several places, most notably Matthew 25: 35-45. Buddhism is chock-a-block with proverbs suggesting we are all one. Wicca, too. Hinduism holds that all souls are partially or fully identical with the Brahma, the supreme soul which encompasses All That Is.
These are OLD thoughts. Hinduism in particular dates back well over five thousand years, and is probably compiled from even older beliefs. It seems odd, at first blush, that so many disparate and ancient traditions should be telling us much the same thing. Especially when that thing is so contrary to what is generally held as truth today.

When I don my New Age cloak--something I don't often do in polite company--I find myself thinking that the only problem in our world is that we have forgotten we're all one, with each other and with the universe. Not that I blame anyone, exactly. The illusions we live under--that we are separate, that Time governs our existence--are terribly pervasive. How do you ignore the evidence of your eyes, whose basic function is to tell you where you end and where the world begins?

I will never forget the first lecture I attended in, of all things, literary criticism. The professor ambled into the room, turned, stared at us defiantly, and sneered. "Everything you know is wrong", he intoned.
Well, that got my attention. What ensued was a headache. The good prof started firing questions at us.
"Who was Adam's wife?"
Well, everybody knows this. "Eve", a dozen people shouted out.
"Was she his only wife?"
People were a little less certain on that, but only a little. "Yes", came the response.
"WRONG!" he shouted. "Lilith was Adam's wife. Also Cain's, and she had children by both. Don't believe me? Look it up."
At the time, Lilith Fair was popular, and that was the only connotation any of us could draw. I looked it up later that day, and couldn't believe what I found.
"When was the first computer built?"
I tackled that one, being something of a computer geek back then. "ENIAC, 1946", I called out, confidently.
"Not bad", he responded, "you're only off by a little over two thousand years."
I thought of calling him on that one, but decided there was no point. I'd just be proven wrong in front of the whole class...ugh. Later on, I looked that up, too..and just about shit myself.
The third inquiry, the one relevant to this post, came."What happens if you throw a ball against a brick wall?"
The entire class sat silent, trying to puzzle out the trap. Nobody could do it. Eventually somebody behind me muttered "it...bounces back...?"
"Well, most of the time, yes, you're right", the prof admitted. "But! If you throw the ball just right, it could go right...through...the wall! Or," he added as an afterthought, "it could get stuck halfway through."
Well now, that was patent bullshit. Several voices, mine included, were raised in protest. The prof didn't budge. "The ball and the wall are both made of atoms", he said. "What we think of as solid is in reality almost entirely empty space. If you throw that ball just so, the atoms of the ball and the wall will mesh. Oh, it's almost an infinite improbability"--I laughed here, thinking of Douglas Adams--but, at least in theory, it could happen."

If, as is now commonly known, so-called "solids" are mostly empty space...and if, as "Blowing In The Wind" asserts, you're currently inhaling part of what was, once, Caesar's (or Beethoven's, or Hitler's) last breath--not to mention submicrosopic bits of each of their bodies...notions of boundaries between the Self and the Universe tend to break down. It becomes possible to perceive the interconnectedness of all things...scientifically. Spirituality and science begin to converge. Indeed, at the quantum level they look a lot alike already.

Douglas Adams also wrote that "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." He was right with the first part, at least. "In No Time" (which seems to be available only in the print edition), is similar in bent to an article here. Basically, these articles argue that time is no more than a system of measurement devised by humans; that in ultimate reality we are all eternal and yet constantly changing (you can't even say 'instantaneously' since that would imply the existence of an instant). In other words, all times are one: everything that has ever happened, or will ever happen, is happening now. As preposterous as that sounds, scientists such as Stephen Hawking take it very seriously. Read the article and prepare to have your mind bent.

Spiritualists, of course, have taken the nonexistence of Time seriously for, well, a long time now. This is but one more example of the eventual convergence of science and spirituality. At some point, we're all going to look at each other and realize we've been using different languages to describe exactly the same thing.

-----------------------------------
Addendum:

I hated math in high school. Science too, to a lesser degree. In both those disciplines (see? they're called 'disciplines', no wonder I hated them!), the answer was either right or wrong, with no room for creative manipulation. Math, though--yecch! Endless, pointless quadratics, plottings on Cartesian graphs, word problems ("if train A left Pillow Station at half past bedtime, and Snoozer entered Dreamland half an hour later, how fast can you fall asleep?")
Nobody ever told me math was useful. Oh, teachers asserted it was, but gave really crappy examples. "Math will help you balance your checkbook." No, that's not math, that's arithmetic. Where after high school am I going to run into the square of the hypotenuse, hmm, Teach?
I'm only finding out now that mathematics has a purpose beyond the purely utilitarian That level of math is so far beyond me I have to take anything it says on faith. But boy! I wish somebody had told me to stick with the math that tormented me, that it could ultimately explain, well, everything. I might have gone into physics. I would just love to take all that stuff I "know" in my gut...and prove it.