Finding Oneness in Science
Part Three: Waking Up to Oneness
“Quantum theory reveals a basic oneness of the universe.”
- Fritjof Capra, Austrian-born American physicist, systems theorist, and deep ecologist
“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.”
- Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory and won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
- Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics.
I am not a scientist, although I have half a degree in Chemical Engineering before I changed to a psychology major at Washington University in my hometown of St. Louis. However, as soon as I could read, I began devouring fascinating books about science. My grade school librarian said, “You read too much. Get out and play.” I didn’t follow her advice.
Nothing in the science of quantum physics proves a spiritual worldview of Oneness. However, when outstanding physicists and other scientists make comparable statements about the unity of creation, I believe that we should at least take note of these statements and seriously consider them. Let’s look at some of them.
This article is different from my other ones. It is primarily what scientists say in their own words. Science writing can be difficult to read, and scientists are not usually known for their interesting writing skills. So strap in, this may require some extra focus, but hopefully for new illumination. You might even want to skim throuigh the parts that are too dense or don’t resonate with you. Focus on the statements that get your attention.
Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger holds a prominent place in the history of science primarily due to his crucial role in the development of quantum physics. Perhaps lesser-known are his insights into duality, consciousness, and mind. He said that the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu spiritual texts, influenced these. Central to his thoughts in this area is that Mind is only One, and there is no separation between subject and object.
He said that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. Multiplicity is only apparent. In truth, there is only one mind”
Schrödinger stated that “consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” This reflects the view that all existence is permeated by consciousness and that consciousness is the underlying reality – rather than just something that is produced by brains of a certain complexity.
In My View of the World, Schrödinger writes, “Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins [Hindu priests] express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, [Sanskrit: “thou art that” in Hinduism, the famous expression of the relationship between the individual and the Absolute.] this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’.
“Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
Larry Dossey is a physician and author who advocates the healing importance of prayer, spirituality, and other non-physical factors. He writes, “For many Westerners, the extent of Schrödinger’s holism can be shocking. He acknowledged this but did not hold back, maintaining, “As inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.”
Dosey says that Schrödinger is “one of most full-throated expressions in modern times of the joining of the divine and the human in a single mind. For Schrödinger, this singular One Mind is God. He did not equivocate. In the One Mind, humans are not ‘like’ God or ‘similar’ to God. We are God.”
Ravi Ravindra
Ravindra holds a Ph.D. in physics and is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he retired as Professor and Chair of Comparative Religion, Professor of International Development Studies and Adjunct Professor of Physics.
He says, “From the scientific side, more and more there is recognition that everything in the universe is connected with everything else. Also there is essentially a driving force in the history of physics to search for one single theory that will include all the other theories, or all the other forces, to find one force or one law. So we get words like unified field theory or theory of everything. But practically all the great sages in India have, at one stage or the other, come to this realization about the Oneness of all there is. In fact, one might almost say that in the general Indian traditions, this is the definition of a sage, and to the degree it is a fact for them, to that degree they are a greater sage.”
Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and is an Austrian-born American physicist, systems theorist, and deep ecologist. He conducted research in particle physics and systems theory at the University of Paris, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Imperial College, London, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
In The Tao of Physics, he writes, “Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘building blocks’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer.
“Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point
Teilhard (1881–1955) was a French Jesuit Catholic priest and paleontologist. He traveled to China to continue his geological research and was there for twenty years, along with many voyages throughout the world. He made five geological research expeditions in China between 1926 and 1935. In 1929 he and two others discovered the “Peking Man” — a pre-human skull that helped introduce homo erectus to the world.
Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who, in the words of the Nicene Creed, is “God from God,” “Light from Light,” “True God from true God,” and “through him all things were made.” In the book of Revelation, Christ describes himself thrice as “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” is a supposed future when everything in the universe spirals toward a final point of unification. The term Omega Point is developed in later writings, such as those of Frank Tipler.
Frank Tipler, physics professor at Tulane University and author of The Physics of Immortality, has developed the Omega Point scientific theory, which posits that the evolution of the Universe will inexorably lead to ever-higher complexity, connectivity and computational density of the final cosmological singularity. Tipler elaborates that photons of light emitted by us could be potentially captured by future superintelligence to “resurrect” each of us in a new simulated reality.
Terence McKenna, an American ethnobotanist and mystic, speaks of the transcendental object at the end of time about the Omega Point in the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. He says that the transhuman is a being that resembles a human in most respects but who has powers and abilities beyond those of standard humans. What Teilhard called the Omega Point many transhumanists now refer to as the Technological Singularity or the Cybernetic Singularity. The underlying idea is essentially the same: At some point, Digital Gaia, the global neural network of billions of hyper-connected humans and ultra-intelligent machines and trillions of sensors around the planet, “wakes up” as a living, conscious superorganism.
More Scientists, Old & New
Danah Zohar studied Physics and Philosophy at MIT and did postgraduate work in Philosophy, Religion & Psychology at Harvard University. Called, “One of “the world’s greatest management thinkers,” she is Visiting Professor in the College of Management at Guizhou University in China. She has proposed spiritual intelligence as an aspect of intelligence that sits above the traditional measure of IQ. She advocates quantum physics as a guiding metaphor for personal psychology and corporate and social organization, in contrast with the deterministic Newtonian mechanics thinkers.
In The Quantum Self, Zohar writes: “At the subatomic level, such correlation experiments have now been carried out many times on pairs of correlated photons, and the non-local influences which bind their lifestyles have been proven many times over. The photons’ behaviour patterns are so eerily linked across any spatial separation — it could be a few centimeters, it could be all the way across the universe — that it appears there is no space between them”.
It has been proposed that the particles must be connected in some way that defies classical conceptions of causality. That would suggest an interconnected universe in line with the beliefs of spirituality.”
Alex M. Vikoulov is a Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist, philosopher of mind, author and filmmaker. He writes, “With the inclusion of God as origin and end of the Universe, human consciousness could ascend to the Transcendent Self, i.e. proceed to the final stage of consciousness evolution, experiential cognition of God.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. He said, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
David Bohm was an American-Brazilian-British scientist described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he writes, “The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.”
Graham Pemberton, a writer on spirituality, politics, psychology, science, and their interrelationships, says, “A key idea in a spiritual worldview is the interconnectedness of the universe; it is said to be one undivided whole. Evidence from quantum physics for this idea is the phenomenon known variously as non-locality, action-at-a-distance, or quantum entanglement. The idea is that two separate but paired particles are interconnected in some way no matter how far apart they are. If an experimenter affects one of the particles, its paired particle responds instantaneously and also changes.
What does this all mean?
Science itself is now demanding a new, non-fragmentary worldview, in the sense that the present approach of analysis of the world into independently existent parts does not work very well in modern physics. It is shown that both in relativity theory and quantum theory, understandings of the undivided Oneness of the universe provide a much more accurate way of considering the nature of reality and, therefore, God and spiritual reality.
Even if science isn't your thing, you can rest assured that the spiritual/mystical worldview is not in opposition to science, like it may have seemed in the past.
Reflection . . .
Which quote resonates most with you? Is there an aspect or description that particularly speaks to you?
Does a scientific perspective influence how you perceive reality? How do these perspectives compare to spiritual/religious perspectives in terms of authority and credibility for you?