RELIGION/SECULARISM – FAITH/SCIENCE
‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’
Many people today continue to find a sense of the sacred and transcendent through devotion to their religion. However, most only seek this out at services on their holy days and religious festivals. During the rest of the week they tend to accommodate themselves to the materialistic values of the secular/consumer world – a world which does not recognise or even acknowledge the sacred or transcendent.
The opinions of those without religious beliefs are derived almost entirely from the physical world ie. all life, physical and mental, can be reduced to ongoing reactions of chemicals and molecules, that can be explained by an evolutionary philosophy/theory, that argues that life emerged from primaeval mud billions of years ago, and by a process of natural selection, gave rise to myriad life forms, with man as the only self-conscious, self-determining, brain-developed animal, acting alone to guide the whole process on it’s progressive march into the future.
The contrast between these views could not be more distinct. The secularist dismisses the beliefs of the religious as outdated superstitions, and prayer as an exercise by fearful and emotionally dependent people, who have created an imaginary all-powerful friend who, they believe can help them through life and intervene on their behalf.
Both these views seem to me not just inadequate, but in many ways a denial of the underlying nature of reality, as revealed by physicists.
Consider:- under an electron microscope, the chair you are sitting in is not solid:
It is a mass of photonic and sonic energies resonating on a particular frequency. It seems solid because our own bodies are resonating on the same frequency in three physical dimensions. Imagine a ‘being’ resonating on other, perhaps higher frequencies, in further dimensions. (Scientists suggest there may be at least eleven dimensions). Such a being might not see ours as solid at all – but view us as creatures bound by these dimensions, trying to control them by measuring their length, depth, height, weight, space and time. Such a being might view us as primitive, because the majority were living as if the three dimensions they were experiencing, made up the whole of their reality. It would be like a leaf on a tree saying ‘I photosynthesise – therefore I am’ – ignoring the branches, trunk and roots, let alone the water-bearing nutrients being drawn up from the ground (of being).
In the sub-atomic world of the quantum, a photon (particle/flow of light) can be everywhere and at once ie. imminent and omnipresent. It is timeless. The founders of most of the great religions were, what we might describe as ‘earthy’ mystics, (ie living in three dimensions but aware of others). Realising the inadequacy of language, they tried to teach/enlighten their followers about the true nature of reality by the use of parables etc.
Today, most ignore/dismiss or have forgotten the greater part of who they really are (the common trunk/roots/ground of being) Thus the religious believe, and are reassured by those beliefs, of attaining a deeper, harmonious state after death. In contrast, the secular-materialist maintains his unbelief in anything transcendent and spiritual, even denying the implications of archetypal and symbolic experience, let alone a commonality of inherited myths handed down by every race and culture throughout history. In refusing even to entertain the possibility of spirituality and transcendence, the secularist makes an idol of his own brain, which he sees as the only rational way for a superior animal, alone in a soul– less universe, to survive. In the developed world this anthropocentric and ego-centric view of man is increasingly prevalent. However, splitting the objectifying brain from deeper consciousness can create a schizoid state – divorcing the conscious surface from the deeper levels of being that speak to the whole human organism. The greater the division and denial, the deeper the sense of dis-ease, and the greater the loneliness.
In the last thirty years or so, this superficial state of consciousness has been exacerbated by a growing addiction to the blizzard of information transmitted and received through the world wide web – e-mails, twitter, tweets etc in which people feel obliged to keep up to speed with events and share their life experiences.
Similarly, another result of this explosion of information is the inevitable need for specialisation (the study of a particular fan of leaves on a twig) ie consciousness becomes compressed – particularly when a subject is being programmed for public consumption; then the relationship between the twig and its branch and trunk, is all but lost because of time constraint. As Goethe pointed out ‘they who cannot draw on three thousand years are living from hand to mouth’ – but to draw on those ‘three thousand years’, we are obliged to slow down, find space, and rest in the timeless depths if we are to make sense of the world and ourselves.
There are further implications for this growing gulf between creative being, and faith in technological development, whose quickening currents are carrying us further and further away from the past, and indeed, from a more holistic understanding of the present; for the very drive for technological power over nature is driven by greed, and is enslaving and destroying the very eco-systems of which humankind is a part, wholly reliant on, and which dance to different tempos.
How then to connect the time-bound physical creation and our obsession with measuring and controlling it, with the eternal, ever-creative, timeless world of those other dimensions that hold ours together?
I wish that everyone (particularly the religious) would read the Bible or the Koran etc, and every time the word God is mentioned, substitute the word ‘Love’. It would be a salutary exercise, particularly reading the Old Testament. Eg how do you square God/Love saying to Moses ‘Kill every Amalekite, man woman and child let there be none left’ with Jesus’s teaching about God/Love in the New Testament? (Clearly, this was a political/cultural decision by Moses for a very good reason, possibly because sexual disease was known to be rampant amongst that tribe. At that time, the men did the fighting, and if they won the battle, seized all the enemies’ women, to build up their numbers. Strikingly, Moses orders the opposite.)
Jesus said – ‘The Kingdom is within you’. God is Light /Love/Spirit – ergo Love equals Light equals Spirit equals God. The timeless, quantum Kingdom that has brought our three physical dimensions together in time, resonates throughout it in our ground of being, seeking to embrace us, and assure us that we are not alone, and calling us back into harmony. So why do we not respond? Why do we find it so difficult?
The opposite of Love is not hate – it is fear. Likewise, the opposite of faith is not unbelief – it is fear.
We cling to riches and status because we are afraid, not just of final oblivion, but of our own vulnerability, and build physical and intellectual defences to protect ourselves. Just as people from religious factions subscribe to defined codes of dogmas and doctrines, so also people with a secular, materialistic outlook subscribe to various political, educational and economic orthodoxes, which they believe will assist future human evolution. All are attempting to build and defend their own empires of belief.
In doing so, they ignore a great universal law – that of differentiation. ie nothing remains the same – at the quantum level, everything is dancing and changing the structure and nature of our three physical dimensions. Thus, no two snowflakes, grains of sand or even clones at a deep level, have ever been the same or can ever remain the same, and all human attempts to build rigid, uniform empires, shaped according to religious or secular doctrines, are doomed to failure. The more centralised the control, the more lignified they become, and the more quickly they will collapse as differentiation undermines them. (A repeat of the archetype of the Tower of Babel). ‘It is the spirit that gives life to the flesh’ – not the reverse.
But the central and vital point I am trying to make is about the nature of time, and the space from which life emerges.
THE IDOL OF TIME
Why is it that we measure out
Our lives against our ticking clocks
The seasons come, the seasons go
And play upon the weathering rocks
The light- years of the fleeing stars
The spectrum of their radiation
We think reveals the Bang and Birth
The linear path of our creation
The Greenwich line, atomic clock
Our yardsticks measuring the flow
Of myriads strokes on one small string
A fixed point on the mowing bow
Yet time to flea or elephant
Bird or fish or wayside flower
Is not a metronomic beat
Of sixty seconds to the hour
We honour calculating brains
Objectifying time and motion
Vivisecting time and matter
Schizoid in their cold devotion
Yet on our own event horizon
Immeasurable round each Black Hole
Exuding into new dimensions,
Timeless to the inner soul
Sing quanta strings of dancing life
Elysian fields of sound and light
Winging in and out of matter –
Without a measurement in sight
Time only exists for the observer of it, because physics shows us that when we try and capture a sub-atomic particle (ie bring it into time) it not only loses its context (is it a particle or a wave?) it defies measurement, and escapes the limits of our brain’s capacity to understand it.
The secularist sees time as billions of years of evolving history. The religious/creationist sees something much more abbreviated. Both are wrong – because they are defining themselves, and the cosmos, by their physical experience of it – the former by a theoretical time-bound philosophy of amoeba to man, and the latter, by a crude, fundamentalist interpretation of their holy book.
Yet, if we return to the statement made earlier – ‘I photosynthesise therefore I am’ – or ‘my Holy Book tells me I was created a few thousand years ago’ – both are looking at our time-bound, three dimensions of existence, and ignoring the timeless quantum level that hold physical existence together ie we live in time, but are created out of sub-atomic, timeless reality. Just as the medieval church placed the earth at the centre of the universe, and taught that everything revolved around our planet, so we today have artificially constructed a time-bound, three dimensional world, with ourselves at the centre, and a ‘theory’ (evolution) to re-inforce our semi-schizoid interpretation of reality.
At one point perhaps there was no veil, between our three physical dimensions and the others – no wardrobe door into Narnia. The Spirit/Love/Light was one seamless creation breathing through the physical and holding all the myriad life forms in harmonious tension. For whatever cosmic, cataclysmic reason (in the Christian tradition, the three dimensions of our planet and the physical universe are traumatised – exiled, out of sync with the timeless reality through there) a heavy veil now hangs between the two realities, (the wardrobe door is firmly closed), and lonely man, knowing himself to be naked and ashamed, now tries to clothe himself, re-write his own history and deeper experience of reality, ignoring the witness of the great spiritual teachers, archetypes and symbols buried in his collective unconscious.
This schizoid attempt to be independent from the great quantum dance operating in the spiritual ground of being is doomed to failure. Only by tearing down the veil, bursting open the Narnian wardrobe door, can a healing harmonious presence be restored. That eternal Kingdom within can only be entered by children. Thus, if we really want to enter it as adults, we have to let go everything, – our fear, pride, intellectual beliefs and creeds, and learn to trust the creating Spirit of Love reaching out to us through our ground of being. We are far bigger and deeper than we realise.
‘Seek the truth and the truth shall set you free’. The way is open again. Before Christians were called Christians, and that faith became codified into a religion set firmly in time, they were said to be ‘in the way’ ie living in the assurance of that timeless flow of creative, healing Love welling up from their ground of being.
Jeremy Bell
Jan. 2014