TURNING POINT
By
Mike Purton
TURNING POINT
By
Mike Purton
It seems we stand today on the brink of a transformation of our understanding of this universe. With the evidence for gravity waves, we now know that all matter is governed by fields of force manifested only by their effects. Our science, which so far has limited itself to the material world, must now face the challenge of adjusting its methods to embrace the non-material waves which lie behind it.
I have never doubted the existence of a supreme being. The visits to our deeply flawed planet by advanced spirits who choose to return here with messages of love, healing and forgiveness appear to be positive proof of a higher power. But would that entity, which Christianity has proclaimed to be both omnipotent and all-loving, have created sentient life forms many of which are hard-wired to kill and eat their fellow creatures in order to live? It seems clear that such a being would have found another way which avoided visiting such pain and suffering on his beloved. Years ago I put this fundamental, but little discussed, problem to Lambeth Palace, who replied that their God had created more herbivores than carnivores. In any case they said, animals did not share the capacity of humans for either physical pain or the fear of being killed – a view which has since been widely challenged. Richard Dawkins, typically, pointed out that they had conveniently ignored the number of herbivores it took to sustain a single carnivorous life. He thought I was wasting my time...
OPENING DOORS
So I have been unable to sign up to any of the Western religions which describe themselves as Christian. But I have spent a long life in pursuit of an answer to the question if that higher power was not the creator, then what was? It took me first into print journalism and then to the BBC, where I became a staff producer of television documentaries. And that was more than fortuitous, for it provided an open door to philosophers, scientists, religious dissidents, and psychics who had their own thoughts on the subject. As I approach the end of this stage of my journey, the evidence appears to point towards ourselves – collectively - as the strongest contender for the role of co-creators of this universe, although the proof is at present beyond the scope of science. But if you consider the world you see around you today, isn’t it just what you would expect from an attempt by recalcitrant teenagers to go their own way in defiance of their father? An aberration which has led to selfishness and greed, to killing and devastation, as witnessed by our news bulletins on a daily basis. And what is the single factor which defines it? It is the search for an entirely material explanation of reality.
A SCIENCE OF MATERIALISM
The scientific method which has brought us to this point is based on the examination of matter as the sole means of understanding the universe. Working on the basis of a continuous process of theories subjected to testing within the limits of its secular framework, it has been highly successful. But only at the cost of excluding many aspects of life which generations of human beings, and some other creatures, have actually experienced. Falling outside the materialist parameters, these have simply been ignored. But increasingly this situation has led to science having to reject the results of its own experiments because of what they revealed. A classic case of this was the evidence for entanglement, which showed that particles of matter, once they have been in contact with one another, retain a relationship for ever, no matter how far apart they move. In the light of the singularity of the first Big Bang, of course, that means all matter. Einstein could never accept it, but since his death it has been proved time and again to be correct. Its implications, however, are still rejected by all but a few dissident scientists.
THE HARD PROBLEM
There is also their difficulty with the nature of the brain. Materialist science insists that consciousness and thought are produced within the head of the individual. There is no physical means by which it can be communicated directly to others. So far, this has been a major problem, as the ultimate objective of physics is a theory of everything. This has been blocked by a mismatch between the two main parts of its endeavours, the science of the very small (quantum mechanics) and that of the large (general relativity). Separately, each has been massively successful. But what should be a natural progression from one to the other has so far resisted all attempts to combine them. At the quantum level, the discovery of the “wave-particle duality” in the process of creation offered a clue that a marriage was indeed possible. But closed minds prevented the physicists from catching on. In the same way they misread the key role of an “observer” in that same process because they were not yet ready to accept the concept of us all being parts of a universal mind. (Presumably they thought it had to be a lab assistant.) The strange thing was that we already knew about light waves, radio waves and other forms of electro-magnetism. All of them, though little understood by the general public, had long been happily accepted and taken for granted as useful aspects of today’s world and the gizmos it provided.
Then, in America in 2016, two widely separated wave detectors both recorded the fleeting sound of two black holes colliding and converging a billion light years ago. It was the first proof that Einstein had been right early in the twentieth century in predicting that gravity waves controlled the movement of everything in the cosmos. But did this discovery, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO for short) have a still greater significance? If gravity waves can carry instructions for how matter moves, cannot other waveforms convey the designs for its very nature? If this seems a stretch too far, consider what we already know about their role in the creative process and all the other areas of our lives in which they play important parts. And - not least – what we know about the sheer consistency and economy of the basic design of the universe and its component parts.
MAKING WAVES
Inevitably, the populist news coverage of LIGO focussed on its implications relating to the more exotic black holes. But the biggest question it raised was the one which science has until now placed off limits “at the sub-atomic stage what is actually the source of those non-material waves?” If you are a materialist scientist in the twenty-first century seeking a theory of everything, as things stand you are up against a brick wall. Your entire discipline has been designed to restrict you to the world of physical objects. At present there is no scientific way by which to address the non-material.
From the religious perspective, in the West there is little help to be had from the churches. Much as they have usually gone hand-in-hand with imperialism, they have also aligned themselves with the course followed by science. The inspirational teachings of the man Jesus, in particular his healing ministry, have had to survive two millennia of human ambition to build power bases on his message with the prestige and wealth they offer. They have also failed to learn from the lessons of much older faiths still based on the direct experience of their founders. The result has been a continued rejection, in the face of a wealth of evidence, of both reincarnation and the spirit’s survival of the body’s Earthly death. Two issues which, if accepted, would relieve the dying and the bereaved of much suffering. But at the cost of priestly power.
So despite its present limitations, it is science which now seems most likely to overcome the final barrier to our understanding of reality. The physicists are working flat-out to find a way to that holy grail of science, their theory of everything. And today there is really only one real obstacle standing in their way. If they are to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics there is no alternative but to address both the wave and what lies behind it. For a start they will have to amend their approach to accept that consciousness - far from being confined to an individual brain – extends across the whole of space.
CONSENSUS REALITY
The irony is that the greatest of science’s own pioneers knew intuitively that the universal mind was the creator of the physical world. To quote just three, Max Planck regarded all matter as derivative from consciousness, while Erwin Schrödinger declared that the Vedic saying “All in One and One in All” led him to create quantum mechanics. While Sir Arthur Eddington said: “All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. Here is a hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and yet unattainable by the methods of physics.” There is already some evidence that the individual brain has the ability to function at the quantum level, but so far its proponents stop short of suggesting that this could lead to influencing emergent reality. Today’s science is not quite ready for that, with all those unwelcome anomalies it would trail in its wake. Among these are telepathy, non-medical healing, distant viewing, near-death experiences, mediumship and clairvoyance. The countless people who have had personal experience of these are well used to waiting for recognition. Meanwhile, some have been accused of being fraudulent, others delusional, while the rest of these accounts are labelled anecdotal, with at best a long-unfulfilled promise that science would one day explain them if they would just be patient.
SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD
Even so, there have already been mental inroads into the material field. Hypnotism has long been established, including on occasion as a substitute for anaesthesia. Then there is the placebo effect. Here, despite its apparent New Age qualities, it has been so consistently successful that the medical profession, much of it in the grip of a lucrative pharmaceutical industry, has had to recognise it as a potential major player at the table: a point amply demonstrated by the use of the placebo as a control in testing new drugs. For the point about all placebos is that medically they are dummies with no pharmacological powers. Their value lies in their role as tokens in this pill-ridden age for the empathetic relationship between the recipient and the healer, who may or may not be a qualified medical practitioner. The patients may not be aware that they have been given placebos – or even know what they are. For a central feature of this is that it appears to operate at the level of non-local mind at which non-medical healers seem to function. In this way it links up with the patient’s own internal pharmacy, where the body’s chemicals can be activated and the healing process take place through the connectedness between two human beings.
When science, as it now must, retraces its steps along the path it has so far followed, I believe it will come to a turning it previously missed. This will lead it not only to the source of those waves and the unifying factor it seeks but ultimately also to our collective salvation. For it will discover that we are not individuals, but essential aspects of a single, indivisible whole. That there are no exceptions, and that in the end wherever we are going we go together. But we progress only at the pace of the slowest.