Physics and Metaphysics

Measuring what can't be measured.

Since the beginning of time, we have wrestled with the same issues. Like an adopted child, we long to find our parents. The problem is every bit as poignant today as it was centuries ago. 

We desire to know who we are, where we came from, and grow weary of fairy tales. We want the truth, not embellished variations. Of course, the problem is so many conflicting messages about truth all coming from many vested points of view. It’s like trying to find the correct diet without realizing that a single diet won’t work for everyone since we are all unique. There are many paths but only one destination.

Before physics, there was metaphysics. Science is all about objective, measurable phenomena and has taken us a long way down the road in answering some basic questions about our beginnings. Still, it will never go all the way since it must work within measurable dimensions by its very construction. Noumenon is beyond measurable matter and can’t be found. No one can measure the mind, much less find it, yet we use the mind continuously. No one can put calipers around essence, yet matter could not exist without it. We are all connected at heart, yet the tie that binds cannot be seen.

For the moment, I would like to demonstrate an irreconcilable conundrum between physics and metaphysics using the tools of science to resolve a metaphysical matter. We all firmly believe in the past, present, and future as time constructs, which we accept as real. Furthermore, we are convinced that we exist in an endless present. The past has gone. The future is not yet, so we are left with the present, by definition.

When we look up into the heavens at night, we see the twinkling of stars. They appear to be real, but when we consider the speed of light, we know that what we are seeing is light, which began the journey to our eyes from each of those stars many thousands of years ago. Some are said to be billions of light-years from us, which means that what we see is something that may no longer exist. Said another way, the stars we see may, in fact, be dead, but we wouldn’t know until billions of years from now. We don’t know what exists in the cosmos now. We see what used to live, proving that you can’t always trust what you see.

That’s fine for distant stars, but how about closer objects: maybe the moon, which is not so remote as a star but still far away. The situation hasn’t changed at all. It just takes the light a shorter time to reach us. And the location is no different when an object is right in front of our faces. We never see what actually exists, only what used to exist even if the time-lapse is very brief (microseconds). The simple truth is that none of us can change what has already occurred. It is finished—already gone like a speeding bullet—by the time we perceive and process with our brains. And that is on a good day.

What about a bad day? A bad day is when we are asleep at the switch; when we are experiencing emotional or mental difficulties (e.g., blinded by filters of bias bigotry, racism, xenophobia, or other forms) that cloud clarity to things as they are—meaning lost in illusion. We don’t even notice what we perceive up there in our buzzing brains. Because we can only recognize something by paying attention to actual reality, which we can’t do when we are day-dreaming, attached to our thinking processes and fixed beliefs. 

We can hope for the absolute best to be awake, accept the fundamental flaws of perception, and move the dial toward an awakened mind—into the metaphysical realm of the nameless. Have a beautiful day. Or is it yesterday?

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison

Forwards or backward?

Two related issues: Vision and execution. One assumes vision comes first with execution following. There is, however, the opposite notion: First execution then the vision. This is clearly the difference between engineering and reverse engineering. The common coin presumption is that engineering depends on vision, and without that nothing can be created.

What would the other way around look like? It happens all of the time. Someone finds something and wonders, “How was this thing made?” Then begins a disassembly process, piece by piece, until the investigator finds out how the thing was made in the first place. But, you might say, “Yes but someone had to engineer the thing in the first place in order for reverse engineering to take place.” 

True enough, but the one doing the engineering doesn’t necessarily need to be another human being. If that was the case there would be no such thing as the science of physics, biology, or any other area of scientific investigation. Nature is full to overflowing with marvelous things being made, but not by humans.

So why am I pointing out this relationship? And what does this have to do with spirituality (which is the central focus of my writing)? The short and simple answer is because nothing is more concrete than a transforming, spiritual experience whether or not it can be explained, which it can’t. Everything I have been writing about for the past 20+ years is an attempt to do the impossible: To explain an ineffable spiritual experience that utterly transformed my life. An accurate explanation can’t be done, but I try nevertheless. It is akin to dancing around a fire without being consumed.

It took me nearly 30 years of concentrated study beyond that life-changing experience to reverse engineer it, and the best I have ever been able to do is like pointing to the light of the moon. The moon is real, not a hallucination, but it is not my finger either.

Spooky reality.

It’s quite amazing how physics is catching up to, and blurring the lines, between the age-old enemies of science and philosophy. Three articles have recently been published in respected scientific papers. One titled, “Quantum chicken-or-egg experiment blurs the distinction between before and after,”  the second reported on the “Nobel Prize Awarded to Two Quantum Physicists,” and the third “The Quantum Theory That Peels Away the Mystery of Measurement” occurred just three days ago.

All three make note of the growing consensus within the physics community that what Einstein referred to as “spooky” can be explained by a principle known as quantum entanglement that allows quanta, perhaps many thousands of miles apart, to reflect a mystical connection that defies rational logic, where before and after are not sequential but rather simultaneously connected.

This chicken and egg, logical, conundrum was postulated, under a different name, nearly four millennia ago in India with the principle of “dependent origination”—Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit.  It is a very simple principle to understand philosophically but, until now, made no logical sense. But then neither did the chicken and egg puzzle. 

At the simplest of philosophical levels, consider “up” and “down,” neither of which can exist without the other. When up arises, down arises simultaneously. When one disappears, the other disappears simultaneously. So too a mother and a child (e.g., chicken and egg). A mother can’t possibly be a mother until the instance of birth since that is how we understand the difference between a mother and a non-mother woman. Before that point of creation, a woman was not yet a mother.

The philosophy takes this a step further (as physics may one day) by pointing out that the nature of one thing is conjoined with another of a completely opposite nature; thus conditional and unconditional. Conditions (the realm of physics) are constantly in motion, even at the quantum level, whereas the unconditional (the realm of metaphysic) never changes, and just like chickens and eggs, one can’t exist without the other. Before the big bang, there was nothing, yet out of Singularity came everything—total opposites.

There are broad and meaningful implications to the latter philosophical observation, concerning the survival of the human race. And these implications takes us into human self-understanding that could save our collective behinds, but only by opening the door and embracing this new/old notion of universal connectivity: We are all different, yet exactly the same, simultaneously. Spooky! Yet not.

The Science of Everything—Nothing

The famous Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra makes an astonishing statement: Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. To the ordinary way of understanding, the statement makes no sense. From that perspective, a form is a detectable object. We can perceive such forms. 

On the other hand, something that is empty is not detectable, so we say that emptiness is void of perceptible objects. That’s our ordinary way of understanding reality, and we refer to that arrangement as mutual discretion, which Aristotle expressed as the Principle of Non-contradiction. The “PNC” says that two matters that are different can’t be in the same place simultaneously, so when we consider the form is emptiness arrangement, we immediately reject the statement. Why? Simple: One is detectable, and the other is not—different, so not the same. Yet there is that perplexing statement, which is supposed to be the height of wisdom. In fact, the sutra says this is the highest wisdom:(perfect wisdom). So what’s so wise about such a curious statement?

If the statement were true, we would be forced to come to terms with how both Aristotle’s and the Buddha’s statements could be the same, even though they appear as polar opposites. Perhaps this emptiness is not really the sort of emptiness we imagine. Probably this nothing is really everything in disguise. How we express thoughts is dependent upon language. Words have a particular meaning. Words are conceptual, but there are no words or concepts to adequately express Śūnyatā (emptiness) because it is beyond words. Words change from one language to another, but the wellspring of all language forms is the human mind, and the mind is not only the source but also the form. 

In one sense, the mind is truly empty, and in another sense, it is everything. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have accepted this puzzling wisdom. They have used it to achieve an enlightened understanding of our world, even while the rest of humanity proceeded down the path of mutual discretion.

Bodhidharma said that the void (emptiness) is the true Buddha, and the Buddha is our primordial mind; that there is no Buddha beyond the mind; no mind that is not a Buddha. Looked at in this way, we can begin to fathom the wisdom. The true Buddha has no defining characteristics, nor does our mind. A mind with defining attributes is not our true mind, and a Buddha with defining attributes is not the true Buddha. Such a mind and such a Buddha would be fake—surrogates for the real thing.

Until very recently, this entire matter stayed as an esoteric spiritual truth. That is no longer the case. What Buddhism has been claiming is now being established by cutting edge theoretical physics. World-renowned physicist Lawrence M. Krauss has now captivated the scientific world with his revolutionary thoughts that confirm what the Buddha said 2,500 years ago: Everything is Nothing. These two paths—The path of the spirit and the path of physics have now converged. Where this leads from a scientific perspective has yet to be determined. But where it leads from a spiritual perspective is realizing that everything is united in emptiness, which is an everything/nothing. We are all one with everything. Watch the video.