| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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Matter is less material and the mind less spiritual than is generally supposed. The habitual separation of physics and psychology, mind and matter is metaphysically indefensible.
– Bertrand Russell
We live in a culture dominated by scientific thinking: by analysis and the partitioning of knowledge. So it is curious to find that science has never really taken root except among peoples who were strongly influenced by the Greeks. All of the other great cultural traditions around the world, particularly those of India and China, have evolved along quite different lines from our own. And while they have spawned artists, philosophers, and poets in great abundance, they have produced no Darwins, no Newtons. It seems strange to us, as if these otherwise marvelously talented folk suffered from some kind of racial myopia which prevented them from seeing how to properly understand the universe, to take it apart, as we do, to reveal the cogs, levers, and springs that make it tick. Shouldn’t it be obvious to any intelligent, civilized person – to any child who has dismantled an old clock – that science is the best way, perhaps the only way, to discover how things really are? Yet we need to remember the extent of our own conditioning: from an early age, we are inculcated with a certain approach to looking at nature. We have a very specific attitude and perspective on the world encoded in our brains. And this makes it hard for us to appreciate that there may be other, perhaps equally valid ways of apprehending reality.
The wellspring of science can be traced to Ionia (in present-day Turkey), on the east coast of the Aegean, in the sixth century B.C. Here the sages of the Milesian school of philosophy established as their goal the discovery of the essential nature, or true constitution of things, which they called physis. Yet they were certainly not physicists in the modern sense because their speculations roamed freely over subject matter that today would be considered not only scientific but also philosophical and religious. To later Greeks they were known as “hylozoists,” or “those who believe that matter is alive,” since as far as the Milesians were concerned, life and nonlife, matter and spirit, were all one. Such a unified outlook is unmistakably mystical in flavor. And it is especially interesting and appropriate, in the light of recent developments, that physics, and Western science in general, should have had such a source.
The mystical attitude to understanding the world was even more evident in the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Although Heraclitus accepted the Ionian “physicists” idea of the wholeness of nature, he was strongly opposed to the reality of Being – the endurance of objects – which they upheld. For Heraclitus, there was only Becoming, a continuous flow and change in all things which he saw as arising from the endless cyclic interplay of opposites. Two opposites comprised a unity which Heraclitus called the Logos. But this was a unity soon to be broken – and with it the monistic and organic tradition of the first period of Greek philosophy.
The split was started by the Eleatic school in southern Italy, which assumed that above all gods and men a divine principle operated. To begin with, this principle was equated with the totality of the universe, but later its identity shifted to that of an intelligent and personal God who orchestrated the cosmos from outside. So began a trend of thought which was to have far-reaching consequences. It would lead, in time, to the divorce of mind and matter, of subject and object, and to a profoundly dualistic mentality that pervaded all future Western culture.
A further step along the road to dualism was taken by Parmenides of Elea, who rejected Heraclitus’s notion of continual Becoming. Parmenides argued that change was logically impossible and that its appearance was a mere illusion of the senses. It then fell upon the Greek philosophers of the fifth century BC to try to reconcile the sharply contrasting views of Parmenides (unchangeable Being) and Heraclitus (eternal Becoming). This led to the idea that Being is represented by certain indestructible substances that form the material basis of the universe, while Becoming – change – comes about as these substances mix and separate. A further development was the notion of the atom as the smallest indivisible unit of matter. And the key point here is that the Greek atomists, led by Leucippus and Democritus, drew a sharp distinction between spirit and matter, depicting the latter as being made up purely of passive and inanimate particles moving in the void. Any spiritual element was thus effectively sucked out of the material universe and confined to a realm of its own.
In the Hellenistic age which followed the Classical period of Greece, in the fourth and third centuries BC, opinion tended to polarize around two principal worldviews. The Epicureans favored a radical form of atomism, rejecting any need for spiritual intervention and placing the gods in the empty space between worlds where they were aloof from the affairs of man. The Stoics, on the other hand, taught that the world is governed by unbreakable natural laws that were laid down by God. Furthermore, they held that the soul is what makes a human being cohere: that it is some subtle essence diffused throughout a person’s frame, much as God, according to their belief, is diffused throughout the world. In the Epicureans view, perception, not the soul, is the source of true and indisputable information. Against this, the Stoics maintained that the soul is what both observes and reasons. These contrasting positions can be seen as an early stage in the development of the debate that continues to this day between science and religion about the fundamental nature of the world.
From the Greeks in general, then, we have inherited a deeply dualistic mind-set, an instinctive, urgent tendency to divide everything into two contrasting, often mutually exclusive, aspects: matter and mind, actual and ideal, observed and theoretical, and, more generally, this and that, and right and wrong. But the specific direction of Western thought for many centuries to come was determined largely by one man. Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great and founder of the Lyceum school in Athens, whose ideas inspired the Stoics, was an energetic collector and organizer of facts, especially biological facts. Much of his time was spent studying the various forms of animals and plants in minute detail with a view to classifying them, and his “scale of nature” became a standard taxonomic reference for many future generations.
Aristotle’s genius and contributions were immense. But for two reasons he is judged, perhaps unfairly, to have had a disastrous effect on the progress of science. First, he believed passionately in teleology, the doctrine of final causes , which maintains that all things – people, lower forms of life, and inanimate objects alike – move unerringly toward a predetermined goal, a perfect final state (like one of Plato’s Forms). With this notion in mind it would have seemed pointless to him to try to uncover relationships in nature because, as he saw it, causes and effects were inherent properties of things. Therefore, whatever conclusions he drew, whatever theories he held – and he held many – he never bothered to check them by experiment. Second, despite all the work he did in classifying the material world, he regarded this to be of far less importance than problems related to the human soul and the contemplation of God’s perfection. Not surprisingly then, in constructing its own cosmology and scheme of nature, the Christian Church found Aristotle’s views both appealing and appropriate. And it was through the Church’s all-pervasive and intimidating power that the seriously flawed doctrines of Aristotle survived, as fossilized relics, through to the end of the Middle Ages. Effectively, the pursuit of science was put on hold for two thousand years.
Those who eventually began to challenge Aristotelianism, in Renaissance times, placed their very lives at risk. And, indeed, Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, was executed for daring to voice his liberal cosmological views. But in the end, despite the threats of torture and death made to other freethinkers of this time, the new spirit of inquiry proved impossible to extinguish.
Spearheading the revolution, in the early years of the seventeenth century, was the Italian Galileo Galilei, the first true scientific researcher. In fact, he was never referred to as a scientist in his day for the simple reason that the word “scientist” only entered our vocabulary in 1834, courtesy of the Cambridge University philosopher William Whewell, Galileo, like Newton and the other great investigators around this time, considered himself to be a natural philosopher. But Galileo was a scientist in the contemporary sense in that he exposed his hypotheses to the possibility of being falsified through carefully controlled experiments. He directed his attention upon a little bit of the world that interested him – a pendulum, perhaps, or a falling object – and then strove to limit or simplify all extraneous influences on his chosen experimental setup.
Central to this methodology was Galileo’s precise distinction, first made public in 1623, between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. This was a vital step in establishing a clear future direction for science, but it was based upon a reaffirmation of the old Greek way of splitting the world into two. Primary qualities were those, such as mass, distance, and time, that could be measured by some suitable instrument. Only these, Galileo maintained, were amenable to scientific study because only these could be treated as if they were independent of the observer. A primary quality can be measured and therefore described by a number in some appropriate system of units – ten grams, six thousand miles, 58.3 seconds, and so on. By contrast, secondary qualities, such as color and love, cannot be reduced to an empirical form and so were deemed to fall outside science’s domain.
Galileo’s cleaving of nature was manifestly Greek in origin. But he and the other new-wave Renaissance thinkers of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe tightened the focus of science to mean the systematic study of the material universe – the universe of things presumed to exist independently of the mind. Henceforth, if science did refer to color, it would not officially be in terms of red or yellow or blue, but in terms of the wavelength of light, a measurable property. And if science did eventually attempt to analyze human emotions, then it would be in terms of quantifiable, physiological events in the brain – electrical potentials, the timings of synaptic firings, the rate of movement of chemicals, and so on. The same sharp distinction between primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities that Galileo brought to science, Descartes, with his separation of matter (res extansa) and mind (res cogitans) introduced to philosophy. And so the scene was set for the emergence of the worldview commonly held in the West today.
Previously, in ancient and medieval times, the universe had seemed organismic; all matter had been held to be living and interconnected. But the clear Cartesian division between subject and object allowed scientists to treat matter as dead and completely separate from themselves, and to envision the universe as a plethora of different objects assembled into a huge machine. At the same time, this was paralleled by the concept of a supervisory God who ruled the world externally and remotely. The laws of nature sought by scientists were thus seen, ultimately, as being the laws of God, eternal and inviolable, to which the world was subjected. This religious component was important because the influence of the Church, though weakened, was still far-reaching. And men such as Newton and, later, Pascal and Mendel, to name but a few, were devout Christians (as, too, are a considerable number of present-day scientists). The separation of matter and spirit allowed them to keep faith both in science and God, without the risk of compromise to either.
That the human body itself was nothing more than an object, a machine, amenable to scientific investigation was an idea promulgated by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had met Galileo in Italy in 1635. Hobbes’s view was inspired to a large extent by the discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey, physician to Elizabeth the First. Previously, people had believed in Aristotle’s and Galen’s theory that the blood ebbed and flowed to and from the same vessels, giving rise to “animal spirits” that differed in different organs. But Harvey’s new mechanistic portrayal of the heart as a pump, and blood vessels as a complex system of tubes and valves, had a deep effect on philosophers of the time. Hobbes simply generalized the image to the whole human being. And thus man took on a new appearance, as a complex mechanism, his behavior potentially explicable in terms of mechanical laws.
There is, undoubtedly, a cold and remote feel to the universe as cast by post-Renaissance science. Though perfect and beautiful in its way, it is an austere abstraction, devoid of “reality tone” – of the vibrant sensations and feelings that are the most immediate aspects of our concern. And this sterile scientific depiction of the cosmos has remained with us to this day. As one of the leading theoreticians of the twentieth century, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, remarked:
[The scientific picture] gives us a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in magnificent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.In confining its attentions exclusively to the objective world, science has become detached from the inner, experiential world of the mind. It may tell you how you see but is mute on the topic of what it is like to see. In An Experiment with Time, an intriguing book about dreams, time, and immortality, first published in 1927, the English writer John William Dunne imagines a situation in which a person who has been totally blind since birth is trying to learn about redness through the language of physics. As Dunne points out:
You might talk to him of particles ... and describe these as oscillating, spinning, circling, colliding, and rebounding in any kind of complicated dance you cared to imagine... You might speak of waves – big waves, little waves, long waves, and short waves... You might hark back to the older physics and descant upon forces ... magnetic, electrical, and gravitational; or you might plunge forward into the newer physics... And you might hold forth upon such lines until exhaustion supervened, while the blind man nodded and smiled appreciation; but it is obvious that, at the end of it all, he would have no more suspicion of what it is that ... you immediately experience when you look at a field poppy than he had at the outset.Science has yielded startling insights into the mathematical infrastructure of the world – the hidden rules by which stones fall, planets orbit, electrons whirl, and stars explode. But in order to do this it has had first to expunge everything that refuses to succumb to description by formulas. From the start, then, science renounces all interest in such matters as are essentially dependent on the presence of a human observer. It sets out to investigate what is assumed would be the case if we didn’t exist. Yet the underlying weakness of this approach was exposed a long time ago. As early as 420 BC, Democritus realized that in studying nature both reason and the senses must be brought to bear. In the case of atoms, for instance, they are assumed to have none of the sensual qualities which are the common everyday experience of human beings. Yet it is precisely because of these qualities that we are able to infer the existence of atoms. Schrödinger again:
So we are faced with the following remarkable situation. While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively by the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space.Two and a half thousand years have taken us from Greek intellectualism to technological mastery over the planet. But this impressive conquest of nature has been at the cost of estranging us – our conscious selves – from the universe that is our birthplace and home. Galileo and the other early scientists portrayed the world of nature as being a realm of objects set over and against the mind. And yet it is clear that every datum used by science in formulating its supposedly objective worldview comes in through the human senses. Every attempt at making an impartial objective observation is foiled at the outset and becomes, instead, a subject of our personal attention. The human observer cannot be left out of the reckoning or be reduced to insignificance, because he or she is the very means by which science is prosecuted. Scientific experimentation and theorizing are conducted necessarily within the emotion-filled, perception-charged, conscious environment of the human mind. And this is a fact that scientists readily admit. Einstein, for instance, often acknowledged his debt to intuition, inspiration, and a sense of irrational awe in the wonder of things. “In every true search of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence,” he once said. And again: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Nevertheless, as a society, we find ourselves in a strange situation. To comprehend the nature of things, our reason has proposed a view of the world which fails to account for the sense impressions upon which its conclusions rest.
Nor is this omission of the subjective something that we can conveniently overlook. The experience of being conscious, of having perceptions and emotions, is an experience with which we are all intimately familiar. It is central and indispensable to our lives. Imagine if you could never again smell a rose, or fresh-cut grass, or newly baked bread. Would you feel adequately compensated for this loss if instead you could fully understand the chemical and physical processes taking place in the olfactory regions of your brain? Would you be willing to trade your ability to perceive sounds and enjoy music for a knowledge of what happens to your neurons when auditory signals arrive from your inner ear? The science of neurology may be fascinating. But what really matters to us (even to neurologists!) at heart is the act of being aware and perceiving – of being conscious in the universe. And it is this whole vital aspect of the world that science simply fails to address. We are cast by science as mere observing machines, convenient tools for gathering data about a universe so vast and ancient that by comparison we seem utterly insignificant.
Science seeks to uncover patterns and connections in nature by treating the world as if it had entirely distant objective and subjective components. Only the objective component, the universe presumed to exist independently of the human and senses, is considered accessible to scientific analysis. But more than this, the objective aspect of the world is taken by science to be the world as it actually is, undistorted by the act of bringing “outside” phenomena into our awareness. Small wonder, then, that we, as experiencing beings, are missing from our physical portrait of nature; we intentionally leave ourselves out from the start.
Yet, oddly enough, we tend to forget this. We begin by purposely exiling ourselves, our feelings, the whole of the subjective, from the scientific cosmos, but then we wonder why science has nothing to say about us, other than that we are sophisticated, motile lumps of matter. We fail to grasp properly the fact that this is bound to happen, that once the world has been translated or reduced to pure number it will inevitably be devoid of human value and meaning. Nor is there anything wrong with this, providing we appreciate the bounds within which contemporary science operates.
Science deals with measurable quantities as if they exist independently, “out there,” irrespective of whether we choose to observe them or not. But we need to keep firmly in mind how we came to know about these quantities in the first place. Clearly, it was by experiencing them. Our ancestors didn’t build clocks on the off chance that there might be something like time which they would then be able to measure. They felt change and progression in their daily lives, they felt duration, the cycle of the seasons and of life and death; the clocks came later. And likewise, distance wasn’t discovered by chance with yardsticks. It was sensed, it came into people’s awareness as a feeling of the separation between things. Thus, that whole aspect of the world which science tries so assiduously to ignore – the subjective – is in fact the very means by which the phenomena explored by science are initially brought its attention. Viewed in this light, Galileo’s categorization seems curiously reversed: our primary and immediate experience is actually subjective, this experience being then projected outward as the expression of a mental model upon which our culture is generally agreed. The subjective cannot be dismissed as a mere derivative or aside. On the contrary, it is inextricably bound up with the world in which we find ourselves – a fact that has recently been demonstrated in the most startling and unexpected way.