SCIENCE
In this last section, we’re looking at ultimate things, at group processes in our spiritual evolution.
Science, like every system, expresses the principles in however disguised a mode. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” is Tao. Quantum mechanics senses the experiential and paradoxical nature of the underlying invisible. Ptolemy to Copernicus: Epicycles and retrograde motion in our lives are more deeply seen as progression in our orbits.
We’re looking at metaphors, for no appearance is a power or a law, God does immediately whatever It intends. God acts unobtrusively, and doesn’t unduly disturb our sleeping. Then when we lift our eyelids, every supposed law is seen through, whether the friendly pull of gravity, the chasm of time, the dominion of death.
We scientists unearth our metaphors for the spiritual quest: creating life; opening the atom; flying to heavenly bodies; planetary intercommunication; and with virtual reality, creating a phenomenal world.
Opposing theories can both contain truth. The debate over steady state or big bang is the result of puzzlement in our mind about: God Is, God Becomes. (Since divine love is dynamic, we find their unity in our meditative contact and living out from that prayer.) Evidence appears for both views, of course.
The steady state: God, No Thingness, always exists, containing the time metaphor while residing entirely beyond it. So the “beginning,” the realized potential to Become always Is Being Now. Just as each of us originates as a zygote descendant of microscopic zygotes, so an expanding universe could accelerate out as an inherent function, not from an explosive point, but from a brief forever, from the beginningless beginning of an infinite regress, a fractal spiral like those nesting Russian dolls. (It does indeed accelerate, when the after-effects of a detonation should decelerate.) The Invisible, bearing no comparisons, is endless in both tininess and immensity. The universe is on the surface of a balloon being blown up; within is a No Thingness vast in its inconceivability. |
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The big bang (the current favorite): We faintly detect a starting point, a birth event---that’s the whole idea of this dream invention we’re in. Being is becoming, the uncreated spreads out; and so we’re “born” at successive levels as we evolve. Both these metaphors lead to our transcendence:
The fruition of the physical sense exists now in our Consciousness, too; we are always coming home. The “end” Is Now. The pivoting knowledge of Who we are threatens our ego; as we juggle this hot potato, we push the “end” farther ahead, gain some needed time, then we search longingly for enlightenment, scrutinizing the depths of space, the center of an atom, developing ever more majestic images. We hunt around the edges of our genuine Self, until grown and ripened we drop into the heart, and as in Hans Christian Andersen, the emperor’s mechanical songbird becomes the living nightingale. Then these wonders of science are redeemed, for nothing is lost, spectacular adventures used in the unforeseeable play of our spiritual abode.
As below, so above; as in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm: we first reach realization individually and only then is it revealed that this is actually happening galactically, universally.
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How everything is its own opposite. Tribes, which live so bodily, often inhabit the mental or psychic plane of awareness. Meanwhile science and technology, the priest and levite of the intellect, dwell mainly on the material plane. So science is healing the split in human belief, helping us reveal the oneness of mental and physical, mind and body.
Subtly we’re all spiraling further.
It all ways cancels out in the dream world. Our social advances are shadowed by their mounting perils and drawbacks. In bringing our mental and physical levels to their highest pitch, we’re preparing to overturn and rescue them, to include them within a broader vision.
Through the sciences, we’re incorporating the priceless sense of a palpable, complex, principled cosmos, of unimagined riches, and a cooperative, wired world. Meanwhile, in all of us, both the mental and material levels strive more and more to go beyond themselves. When we consciously know an invention as a spiritual idea, it opens us up to the greater realm of awareness, its inspiration connects us to Life Appearing As many forms.
Everything we do is a prayer. In our group mind, we hold complementary views, not competing but completing the Tao. Every swing along the arms of the caduceus leads to an embrace. All our probings and disrobings in Operation Bootstrap, the purposes of the scientist, the mystic, the artist, the laborer, the warrior, each contribute to building our temple.