The disciple looked baffled. "All this may be true, sir, but none of it makes me unreal. Perhaps I am just very confused."
The master shook his head. "If so, then everyone is just as confused. The truth is that what we call a person is constantly in flux. There are long stretches of forgotten time, not to mention our lapse of consciousness when we sleep. Memory is faulty, and only the mind"s craving for continuity keeps alive the illusion that "I" is constant. "I" is never constant. For every experience there is a different experiencer."
"I am beginning to see what you mean," the disciple said with considerably more humbleness. "Although you make it seem that nothing can be trusted."
"Nothing about the changing personality can be trusted," said the master.
"But there is more to life than experience. Things come and go-feelings, events, achievements. Pleasure is inevitably followed by pain. Success is bound up with failure. Yet behind all this show of change, something remains aware at all times. Find out what that awareness is and you will have what can be trusted. This is the way out of illusion."
In a society where we do not cultivate spiritual relationships, this kind of lesson is hard to learn. We continue to foster our alter egos, the many experiencers who are born with every experience. From the virtual perspective, however, our lives are therefore spent in illusion, because in reality we are not really limited by time and s.p.a.ce, nor by this one body and mind. To discover our true nature involves a process of growth, and part of that growth is to deal with conflicts inside boundaries. If you have anxiety, you aren"t supposed to shuffle it off onto another ego but deal with it within the limits of yourself. Multiple personality syndrome is therefore a strategy that works in the short run, because the separate egos usually have no idea of what the others are going through, but in the long run the person isn"t anybody whole, just a collection of floating, disorganized fragments.
Multiple personality doesn"t have to be so disordered. We are all multiple personalities in that we switch from one role to another every day. I shift my ident.i.ty among personas called father, son, brother, husband, professional. In fact, our inner dialogue is always based on the roles we are playing. If I think about a patient, the role of doctor becomes my internal reference point; if I think about my son, the internal reference point shifts automatically to father. This is not a disordered process; indeed people who cannot shift roles, who always have to be the authority or the boss, for example, even when that is not appropriate, suffer from an inability to express their multiple personalities.
But the real "I" is neither doctor nor father nor any of my roles. "I"
exists beyond and then manifests as father or doctor or son with the flicker of intention. To be grounded in this "I" is to be an alert witness to the roles we a.s.sume. This alert witness, because it exists in the virtual realm, approaches the mind of G.o.d. It may even be a part of G.o.d, for we a.s.sign to G.o.d the role of cosmic witness, the creator who looks on his creation with an all-knowing gaze. We don"t yet know what that gaze means. We haven"t yet addressed the issue of whether G.o.d is judging us.
But at least we have gone beyond the illusion of our ever-shifting ego, and any step closer to the witness is moving closer to the divine.
SYNCHRONICITY.
Time is not neutral. We say that it flows, and flow implies a direction, as well as a place where the journey ends. To the human mind, time has always flowed toward us. We are the end point of all those billions of years of evolution. G.o.d laid out time for us, as he continues to lay out each person"s life so that it has a purpose to its unfolding. Such at least was the old belief, but to hold that G.o.d, a timeless being, sits outside the universe and plans the ticktock of creation is no longer tenable.
We a.s.sume instead that randomness rules. Science has offered chaos theory to demonstrate that disorder lies at the heart of nature. As we have already seen, every object can be reduced to a swirl of energy that has no more pattern than a swirl of tobacco smoke puffed into the air. The scientific worldview tells us that events are not organized by any kind of outside force. A coincidence says otherwise; it is like a momentary reprieve from chaos. When two strangers meet and discover by chance that they have the same name or phone number, when someone decides at the last minute not to board a jet that later crashes, or when any train of events takes place that is exactly what is needed to reach an outcome, it seems as though more than simple coincidence is at work. Jung invented the term synchronicity to cover these "meaningful coincidences," and the term has stuck even though it doesn"t cast much light on the mystery. What outside force can organize time in such a way that two things meet, like the t.i.tanic and the iceberg, with such a sense of fatefulness?
My own life has been touched often by synchronicity, so much so that now I get on an airplane expecting the pa.s.senger in the next seat to be surprisingly important to me, either just the voice I need to hear to solve a problem or a missing link in a transaction that needs to come together. (One time a staff consultant called me on the cell phone with enthusiastic plans for manufacturing a new and healthier line of herbal teas. I was running late to a plane, so I couldn"t talk, and the proposal at that moment seemed far-fetched and rather impractical. The flight attendant guided me into the last remaining seat on a totally booked flight, and as if by design, the stranger next to me was a wholesaler in herbal teas.) Therefore my thoughts on this matter are highly personal: I believe that all coincidences are messages from the unmanifest-they are like angels without wings, so to speak, sudden interruptions of superficial life by a deeper layer. On the scientific side, however, I also suspect that there are no coincidences at all. Synchronicity is built into us at the genetic level, but our conscious minds choose to ignore this fact. We do not admit that our lives are balanced on the knife-edge of time.
In a way no one has satisfactorily explained, our DNA is both in time and outside it. It is in time because all bodily processes are subject to cycles and rhythms, yet DNA is much more isolated than other chemicals anywhere in the body. Like a queen bee in her chamber, your DNA remains insulated within the cell"s nucleus, and 99 percent of your genetic material lies dormant or inactive until it needs to uncoil and divide to create a mirror image of itself. Inactive DNA is chemically inert, and here is where time becomes more ambiguous. How does an inert chemical decide to wake up, and when?
For a child to lose her baby teeth and replace them with adult ones, DNA has to know a great deal about the pa.s.sage of time. The same holds true for any process-the maturing of the immune system, learning to walk and talk, the long gestation of a fetus in the womb-that must take place on schedule. Death itself may be a genetic response coded into our cells with a hidden timetable, the theory being that our ancestors could not have afforded to live too long. A tribe of mostly young, child-bearing members would be able to fight and gather food better than one burdened by excessive numbers of old people. DNA could take care of that dilemma by programming its own decline and demise, as gra.s.s does with the first frost, guaranteeing the survival of the species at the cost of the individual.
Such speculation, however fascinating, begs the main question. How does DNA have any sense of time? It lives in a purely chemical world, surrounded by molecules that float by. It is certainly true that every cell maintains incredibly complex sequencing of chemical reactions-the marvel is that a cell can breathe, feed itself, excrete wastes, divide, and heal while living on death row, since a sentence of death is hanging over each cell all the time. This sentence is imposed by the fact that a cell cannot store reserves of oxygen and nutrients. It depends entirely on what flows into it. Cells stand at the forefront of life, storing no more than three seconds" worth of food and air; they cannot wait on late deliveries; lapses in efficiency would be instantly fatal.
Researchers can isolate those enzymes or peptides that carry the messages needed to trigger any given process in a cell, or to end it. This doesn"t really tell us who decided to send the messages in the first place or how thousands of signals manage to stay so precisely coordinated. Ultimately, all messages are sent by DNA to itself.
Looking outside our bodies, one can a.s.sume that DNA had to evolve in a random world. Even at this very moment the a.s.sault on your body from the environment remains unpredictable. Cosmic rays penetrate your cells randomly, a bombardment that can potentially damage your genes. Random cell mutations occur as the result of mischance or accident, and your DNA has no guarantee that food, water, and temperature will be predictable, not to mention the sudden inrush of new toxins and pollutants of every kind.
Imagine ancestral strands of DNA trying to survive in conditions far worse, as a young Earth convulsed through extremes of hot and cold in an atmosphere electrically charged with storms and filled with methane gas.
Somehow DNA not only survived conditions that would have killed us in a matter of days or hours, but it evolved in such a way that when this hostile environment changed to a more benign one, our genes were prepared for that as well.
Except for the rotation of the planet and the change of seasons, DNA wasn"t exposed to a world of precise timing. Yet one has to conclude that when DNA took the immense step of learning to reproduce itself, a mastery of time came along. As strange as it sounds, bits of nucleic acid learned to read a watch down to thousandths of a second, and no amount of trauma from the outside world has made a dent in that ability. DNA"s mastery of time is woven into the texture of life itself.
Having seen this, the leap into synchronicity is not far. We only need to add the subjective ingredient: time has been ordered to benefit me, not just for my genes. Have you ever been stuck on some problem and turned on the television, only to have the next words coming out of it suddenly offer you a solution? A friend of mine was stepping onto a bus one day, wondering if he should heed the advice of a certain spiritual teacher, when the man ahead of him in line turned around and without any prompting said, "Trust him." These messages come from a level of mind that knows life as a whole, and ultimately we would have to say that we are really communicating with ourselves-the whole is talking to its parts.
Synchronicity steps outside the brain and works from a larger perspective.
Eliminating mind from the equation won"t work because the only alternative is chance. In the mid-1980s, a man in Canada won the national lottery two years in a row. Since we know how many tickets were sold, the odds against this happening by chance can be precisely computed, and the answer is trillions and trillions to one-the exact number was said to be greater than the known stars in the universe. One reason Jung invented a new word for these meaningful coincidences is that the normal rational way of explaining them turned out to be too unwieldy. If I sit next to a stranger on a plane who is looking for a certain book idea to publish and that happens to be the very idea I am working on, the explanation of statistical probability does not apply.
Although not easy to calculate, the odds of most synchronous events are preposterous. Anytime two people meet and discover that they have the same name or phone number, the odds are millions to one against their encounter. Yet this occasionally happens, and the simple explanation-that they were meant to meet-makes more sense than random numbers, but it isn"t scientific. In spiritual reality, however, literally everything happens because it is meant to. The world is a meaningful place; everyone is working out their own lives" purpose. At synchronous moments, you get a peek at just how connected your life is, how completely woven into the infinite tapestry of existence.
In the future, as spirit is given more credibility, I think the term synchronicity will become outmoded; our descendants will take for granted that all events are organized into patterns. Like our DNA, we have always flowed with the river of time and sat on the banks observing it simultaneously. It is only outside time that we can view our own deepest intelligence, because in the thick of things, time captures our attention and pulls us into its web. When we consider that we might be weaving the web, but from another level of reality, the possibility opens that G.o.d is sharing this task with us. We are building the argument that every aspect of creation requires us to be a co-creator, and this notion makes intimacy with G.o.d more and more likely.
CLAIRVOYANCE AND PROPHECY.
The quantum world is a place of blurry edges and uncertain outcomes. As we have seen, the things that seem so well defined in the material world turn into shadowy phantoms the deeper we go into the unmanifest domain. Time is no exception, and at a certain level of reality it hardly exists. When the boundary of time dissolves completely, it is possible to experience a kind of mental time travel called clairvoyance, or the ability to see into the future.
The brain cannot construct the clairvoyant state, as far as we know, since its visual centers are preoccupied with present sensations. Dreams are a kind of false vision, in that they are not really happening before our eyes yet appear to be. The clairvoyant is also experiencing an "unreal"
visual state, yet the inner vision happens to come true. How, then, can a purely internal firing of neurons match events that have not come to pa.s.s?
In my experience those who consider themselves clairvoyant are not all gifted with the same abilities. Inner vision can be clear or blurred; it can come and go, which makes it often unreliable; and its accuracy is always open to question, since no one knows to what extent the future is predetermined or open to change. A young friend of mine fell in love with a woman who, though fond of him, did not return his strong feelings. He became convinced, however, that she was his soul mate. He despaired of ever turning her feelings around and went to a psychic to find out if his soul-mate theory was true. The psychic came up with a startling number of accurate details. She a.s.sured him that she saw a woman named Tara with long brown hair who was going to art school. She further saw that the two of them would soon be living together; Tara"s feelings would change, and as she recognized their deep spiritual bond it would become possible for the two to marry. This future vision, which included two children and a move to Los Angeles, delighted my friend, because it precisely fit his own vision of what the future should be.
And that was the problem. Even though the psychic had tuned in to something deep in my friend"s awareness, the pictures in her vision didn"t come true. Far from being rea.s.sured, Tara was made very uncomfortable by the revelation that she was destined to wed a man whom she considered no more than a good friend. She withdrew from him, eventually finding her own boyfriend and moving in with him during summer vacation. The connection of two soul mates was never realized.
Yet I know of other clairvoyants who do not seem to be misled by the hopes of their clients. They seem able to divide the wishful image from the actual event that will transpire, giving accurate images of a future mate or the outcome of a lawsuit, down to the exact timing of a judge"s rulings. This accuracy gives serious pause, because as much as we might want to know the future, a preordained outcome renders all our striving insignificant. (To a skeptic who discredits clairvoyance, the problem is moot, naturally.) What would make us believe that clairvoyance is genuine? How is it different from other subjective illusions like dreams and hallucinations?
For one thing, dreams typically contain material that was already present inside the person"s memory. The symbols of a dream may be mysterious at first glance, but since dreams are wholly drawn from past experience, like old wine in new bottles, they are subject to interpretation. A clairvoyant, however, sees something new. But dreams and clairvoyance do have one strong link: they seem to depend on a person"s belief or the belief system of a whole society.
This implies that there is more than one way for the future to flow into the present. It can send messages ahead or keep itself completely veiled; it can choose those who will see and those who will be blind. Much more than we realize, our own awareness may be creating the boundaries of past, present, and future. In other words, we may be choosing not to be clairvoyant so that our belief in a hidden future is confirmed. When Ca.s.sandra foresaw the fall of Troy in the Iliad, her vision might have been believed, since the belief system of the ancient world included clairvoyant knowledge. (As it happened, the G.o.ds had cursed her always to be right and yet never to be believed; we call such a person a Ca.s.sandra to this day.) In quantum terms, one cannot be certain about the line between hallucinations and reality. There are no definite events, no river of time that flows from past to present to future. What exists in its place is a rich matrix of possible outcomes. There are infinite choices within every event, and we determine which select few are going to manifest. At the depths of the mind field, where all things exist in seed form as virtual events, it hardly matters which ones eventually sprout. They are no more real than the seeds that didn"t.
The most famous expression of this concept is the paradox of Schrodinger"s cat, named after one of the founders of quantum physics. Schrodinger was trying to imagine how matter behaves when it begins to disappear into energy. He imagined a clever and rather s.a.d.i.s.tic mechanism, a box that holds a cat inside, hidden from view. A trigger in the box will release a poison to kill the cat if it is. .h.i.t by a single electron. An electron is shot at the box in such a way that it can only go through two slits-if it takes a path through the left slit, the cat will survive; through the right, the cat will be killed. But since this is the quantum world, things are not well defined, and there is no way to tell which slit the electron chooses. Until the observer looks, the electron has chosen both slits equally.
In this paradox the observer will know what path the electron took only by opening the box and seeing if the cat is alive or dead. Until that moment, both choices are valid, which means-and here is the startling part-that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. Opening the box determines its fate, because it takes an observer to cause the electron to have a defined place in s.p.a.ce and time. Without the observer"s act, there is no defined outcome.
For decades the paradox of Schrodinger"s cat has been taken to be a clever mental trick, since physicists do not believe that quantum uncertainty exists beyond the level of electrons and photons. But the clairvoyant seems to indicate otherwise. In his vision, the future has two locations-here and later. He can choose which one to partic.i.p.ate in simply by using the same power of observation that the physicist uses with an electron.
Those of us who accept a simpler world, in which the future has only one location-later-are showing a personal preference; we are not obeying an iron law. The usefulness of time is that it keeps all the seeds of future events from sprouting at once. Time dictates that first one thing happens and then the next, without overlap. You cannot be a child and an adult simultaneously-except through clairvoyance. Then the leaking of one event into the next is allowed. All of us have had "gut feelings" that tell us when some situation will not turn out well. In these instances we have called upon a diluted form of clairvoyance that affords a clue to what will happen next.
Is clairvoyance useful or not? Should one try to develop it or ignore it out of respect for the boundaries of time? Here no fixed answer can be given. Our DNA has to be clairvoyant; we could not survive if our genes did not know the future; the unfolding of an embryo in the womb, as it evolves from a single cell to billions, requires that DNA precisely foresees when neurons, heart cells, muscle tissue, and every other specialized mutation needs to develop. If neurons grew on the wrong day, the day when fingers needed to emerge, for example, havoc would result. So that first fertilized ovum contains a map of the future imprinted in invisible ink.
Other situations are not so clear. In general, the highest purpose of clairvoyance may be to give us a glimpse into the mind of G.o.d, because a divine mind could not be constrained by time and does not recognize past, present, or future. If you decide to soften the boundary of time, you must take responsibility for all that comes with such a decision. Science fiction is rife with stories of reckless time travelers who found disaster when they broke into the future or the past. At the very least, one runs the risk of getting present time and vision time hopelessly confused. The spiritual masters keep teaching us that living in the present moment is the ideal, if only we can reach it. The Jewish philosopher Philo, who was a follower of Plato, writes: ""Today" means boundless and inexhaustible eternity. Periods of months and years and of time in general are ideas of man, who calculates by number; but the true name of eternity is Today."
This is the ultimate mystery of clairvoyance-any moment, whether now or later, is a doorway into the same eternity.
I believe that prophets live in this expanded s.p.a.ce as well, and although we tend to fixate on their ability to foresee events, their truly spiritual function is to see beyond time. An ability to transcend time isn"t mystical; every culture has specific beliefs about this. In India, prophecy has been organized into a detailed system of astrology called Jyotish (the name is rooted in the Sanskrit word jyoti, which means "light"). Prediction of the future literally means examining what the light has to say, and the ultimate astrologer is a visionary who bypa.s.ses all charts to peer directly into the light of the future.
We can begin to understand how this works only by our knowledge of quantum reality, for there all light is born. Time and s.p.a.ce are interchangeable at the quantum level. Where a particle will be and when it will be there are bound up together. In this way energy is not separate from s.p.a.ce-time.
They form one tapestry. The astrologer goes a step further. He breaks the entire cosmos down into specific kinds of energy as they apply to human existence. In Jyotish certain planets are generally beneficial in their energies (such as Jupiter and Venus), while others are generally harmful (such as Mars and the Sun).
As these energies interact, enormously complex patterns emerge. Jyotish can generate sixteen separate charts for each person, involving the most minute motions of planets; time can be subdivided into fractions of a second to arrive at specific predictions about a person"s future. And since each degree of change in the heavenly bodies creates a new frequency of energy, the astrologer must memorize several thousand individual patterns between any two or three planets-these arrangements are called yogas, literally the "yoking" of stars.
To its proponents Jyotish is a quantum science, because what is seen on the material level-the rotation of planets in their orbits-disguises a deeper scheme. In the deeper scheme, every atom and molecule is connected.
By exchanging energy, each point in the universe is whispering to every other point. In this case, however, energy contains information. Imagine a line of people pa.s.sing a secret by whispering it from person to person down the line. If each person whispered gibberish, there would be no information being pa.s.sed along, only raw energy. But if there is a secret being spoken, the same energy becomes meaningful. It binds the group together through shared knowledge, and this invisible bond, even when unspoken, can be extremely powerful. Jyotish considers the universe to be secretly bound in Just this way; every exchange of energy contains some clue to future events.
The concept of information embedded in energy isn"t totally alien outside astrology. To a physicist information is pervasive throughout nature. The specific frequencies that make infrared light different from ultraviolet, or gamma rays different from radio waves, all form a kind of cosmic code.
Human beings tune in to this code and use it for our own purposes-it is the information embedded in energy that allows us to build electrical generators, infrared lamps, radio beacons, and so forth. Without that coded information, the universe would be a random vibration, a quantum soup of alphabet letters but no words.
Jyotish a.s.serts that the information coded into energy has human significance. In other words, the future is spelled out in light. Photons actually speak to the astrologer, forming exact patterns that will emerge eventually as events in time. An ancient master of astrology named Brighu gave startling proof of this. Thousands of years ago he sat down to write charts that would predict the lives of people in the future, those not yet born. But even more amazing, he set down only the charts of people who would actually show up in the future to get a reading. If I were to go to Benares and visit a Brighu reader, as one is called, the test of his authenticity would be that my chart would be waiting for me, detailed down to the minute that I crossed the doorstep.
Boundaries are all made in consciousness and dissolved in consciousness.
To be able to cross the boundary of time or to speak the language of light tells us that even our most basic a.s.sumptions are open to choice.
Awareness is all. The present moment is so valued by spiritual masters because it is the place where awareness can be focused. The past and the future are distractions, pulling us into an abstract mental state that will never be alive. You cannot dive deep into an illusion, but it may turn out, once awareness is willing to expand, that you can dive infinitely into this moment. The present has been called "the eternal now"
because it refreshes itself without end. With this realization, the door to wisdom is opened, despite all our current fears that wisdom has withered or is somehow a thing of the past. The past is actually the enemy of wisdom. Any kind of linear thinking is doomed to remain trapped on the surface of life. But if we experience our minds as multidimensional, we get closer to G.o.d"s mind, which is all-dimensional.
Six.
CONTACTING G.o.d.
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
-MATTHEW 7:7 Knowing G.o.d would be impossible if he didn"t want to be known. There is nothing to prevent every stage of spirituality from being a delusion. The saint who speaks to G.o.d may be suffering from a lesion of the right temporal lobe. On the other hand, a convinced atheist may be shutting out messages from G.o.d every day.
Our quantum model tells us three ways that G.o.d is already contacting us: 1. He exists at a level of reality beyond the five senses that is the source of our being. Since we are quantum creatures, we partic.i.p.ate in G.o.d all the time without acknowledging it.
2. He is sending us messages or clues into the physical world. We"ve called this the flow of reality.
3. He is attracting notice through "second attention,"
the deepest intuitive part of our brains, which most people ignore.
These three ways to know G.o.d are based on the facts acc.u.mulated in our search so far. We"ve built the plane and we know the theory of flight-what remains is to take off.
G.o.d seems to be sending us messages from outside time and s.p.a.ce. Some of these spiritual clues are faint, but some are very dramatic. One of the most recent healings at Lourdes happened to a young Irishman afflicted with multiple sclerosis. He arrived late at the shrine, after the holy waters were closed to the public for the day. His only access to Lourdes was to wait outside the walls and listen to the vesper services before sunset.
Disappointed, he was taken back to his hotel in a wheelchair. Sitting alone in his room, he suddenly felt a change. His body grew warm and as he lay down on the bed, a bolt of light shot up his spine, causing him to writhe from its intensity; he lost consciousness. But when he awoke, he could walk, and all signs of his MS had vanished. He returned home healed.
I think there is no doubt, given the thousands of people who have had such experiences, that this is the "light of G.o.d," revered in every sacred tradition. The light fascinates us because G.o.d enters our world in few other ways that are as tangible.
In research polls, up to half of Americans say that they have experienced some form of light that they couldn"t explain, either internally or as an external aura or halo. About a third of Americans say that they are "born again," which we can interpret as a spiritual awakening of some kind. One of the most famous of modern Indian saints was Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali who attended Cambridge around the turn of the century before entering the holy life back in India. Aurobindo"s own awakening began the instant he set foot on native soil, when an almost electric shock awakened him to the truth of higher consciousness. He later speculated that all human beings are on the road to enlightenment via a process of mental evolution. (The late Jonas Salk devoted many years to a similar theory that human beings were about to make the transition from biological evolution, which perfected our physical structure, to "metabiological" evolution, which would perfect our spirit.) A form of "supra-consciousness," as Aurobindo termed it, is gradually descending upon us, beginning with the higher centers of awareness, those that cause us to intuit G.o.d"s existence, then making its way down until our very cells are transformed. According to Aurobindo, G.o.d can send "arrows of light" into our world, but these go in only one direction. We can receive them as impulses of inspiration, yet our thoughts cannot retrace their path.
To get back to the source of G.o.d"s messages, we would have to use second attention, our ability to know something without any physical information.
Intuition and prophecy involve second attention. So does the saint"s insight into G.o.d and the controlled experiment in which people know that they are being watched from another room. Jesus speaks about his Father as if possessing intimate knowledge, and this too derives from second attention at its most developed level. Significantly, when we hear the sayings of Jesus, such as "Know the truth and the truth shall set you free," our minds respond. It is as if second attention in us is sleepy but willing to wake up. This accounts for much of the fascination that all sages and seers hold for ordinary people.
For the moment I am going to set aside the conventional ways to find G.o.d, such as prayer, contemplation, faith, good works, and virtue. This isn"t to discount them, but certain stark facts have to be recognized. Many believers use all these means to know G.o.d and come up empty-handed. When they seem to work, they are inconsistent-some prayers are answered while others go completely unheeded, faith can work miracles but sometimes it can"t. Most important, the conventional paths to G.o.d have not abolished atheism. However powerful a subjective experience may be, since it cannot be shared, person A is outside the inner world of person B. The process is shut in a private, self-enclosed coc.o.o.n.
Before describing how second attention-the key to picking up the spiritual messages sent by G.o.d-can be developed, we have to rid ourselves of self-delusion. Stripped down to its essentials, by seeking to know G.o.d we run into the same problem we do when we seek to know what lies outside the universe. It is the problem of defining objective reality. By definition the universe contains everything, so the rational mind might a.s.sume that nothing lies outside it. The rational mind would be wrong. Theorists can construct perfectly plausible versions of other dimensions. In one model our universe is just a bubble on the outside of an expanding super-universe with ten or more dimensions that our senses can"t perceive.
Perhaps one of them is the home of angels? Reason can neither prove nor disprove the possibility, but it can get tantalizingly close.
Without ever seeing into this other world, we can observe black holes and quasars, which are the nearest thing to windows on the edge of infinity.
As light and energy get sucked into a black hole, they disappear from our cosmos. This implies that they are going somewhere; therefore they might also return to us via "white holes" or acts of creation like the Big Bang.
G.o.d is not this knowable, however. There is no black hole that sucks you into his world, unless it is death. The great fascination of near-death experiences is that people return convinced that they have entered the divine presence, but the information they bring back is limited. Most report a white light that bathed them in love and peace, but a small minority say it burns with the torment of h.e.l.l rather than the rapture of heaven and that the being who beckons at the end of the tunnel isn"t benign but evil. Moreover, near-death experiences can be duplicated artificially through oxygen deprivation to the brain, as we mentioned before. In these cases the same white light often appears, so perhaps it is just an artifact of the cerebrum as it begins to suffocate.
We need better proof that G.o.d wants to be found in his cosmic hiding place. Then the whole development of second attention will fall into place as the truest approach to the domain of spirit.
To know G.o.d personally, you must penetrate a boundary that physicists call "the event horizon," a line that divides reality sharply in half. On this side lies anything that remains within the speed of light; on the other side is anything faster than the speed of light. Einstein was among the first theorists to propose that the speed of light is connected to s.p.a.ce-time in a crucial way. The speed of light is absolute; it is like a wall that no object can crash through. As we approach the wall, time slows down, ma.s.s increases, and s.p.a.ce becomes curved. If you try to crash through, weird things happen to prevent you from doing so.
For example, any light that pa.s.ses too near a black hole gets pulled into its field of gravity. Black holes are the remnants of old stars that collapsed onto themselves when they ran out of fuel. Aging stars are already too dense for us to imagine-a single teaspoon of matter inside one may be millions of times heavier than the whole earth. As this stellar fuel collapses it can get out of control, like a runaway train. In some instances the momentum is irreversible, and even light cannot escape from the star"s force field. In that case there is only blackness-a black hole-that engulfs any pa.s.sing object. If a photon of light tries to go around a black hole, it will start to curve in the hole"s direction until it falls in.
This is where Einstein"s absolute wall meets its match. The photon is traveling as fast as anything can go, so it isn"t possible for a black hole to make it go any faster. On the other hand, a photon has to go faster if it wants to escape the clutches of the black hole"s immense gravity. At the exact meeting point where the photon and the black hole are equal, everything becomes weird. To an outside observer, the photon falls into the back hole forever, frozen in time. Inside the black hole, however, the photon has already been devoured, in less than a hundred microseconds. Both versions are true. One is seen from the world of light, the other from the world beyond light. To use Heisenberg"s phrase, an "uncertainty principle" holds true at this level of nature-event A and event B both exist together, even though they are opposites. This borderline of uncertainty is the event horizon, the exact margin dividing reality in half between the certain and the uncertain, the known and the unknown.
Any place where knowledge stops there is also an event horizon. The brain can"t explore beyond where photons go. There is no perception without juggling photons around. If my cat or dog was staring right at G.o.d, it would do me no good because I don"t share their nervous systems. A nervous system is just a machine for sensing photons. Depending on what model you have, your pattern of photons is different from that produced by other models. The mind may cross the event horizon in theory, using intellectual speculation and advanced mathematics, but this is like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole. When Kierkegaard made his famous remark that G.o.d is known only through a leap of faith, he was referring to a spiritual rabbit hole.
What lies beyond the event horizon? It could be a new universe with intelligent life in it; it could be a tea party of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses; or it could be a chaos of squashed dimensions tumbling like twisted sheets in a dryer.
Thus ends the whole search for G.o.d. Or does it? Strangely enough, lots of things lie beyond the event horizon that turn out to be useful. Quantum physics dips across the border all the time, only it can"t stay there very long. When a particle accelerator bombards two atoms, causing a subatomic particle to jump out of its hiding place for a few millionths of a second, the event horizon has been crossed. Something that was unknowable by the five senses suddenly jumps into our world. Combining this with various "thought experiments," science inched its way toward nuclear power, transistors, and (if we look into the future) advanced computer memory and time travel. Already a beam of light has been made to move from one location to another in a Cal Tech laboratory without crossing the s.p.a.ce in between, which is a form of primitive time travel. We are learning little by little to be at home across the event horizon.
A skeptic may argue (quite fiercely) that I am distorting the event horizon beyond its literal meaning. If you throw a pebble into a black hole, it will seem to freeze in place forever, utterly defying physical laws of motion, but does that mean G.o.d is eternal? No-the event horizon is not accepted by science as the limit of mind. It is intriguing that the Buddha once shut his eyes for a moment and upon opening them declared that he had experienced ninety-nine thousand past incarnations, but this example of time travel could be imaginary. What we do know is that G.o.d can"t be on this side of the event horizon. Since the Big Bang, light has been traveling for about ten to fifteen billion years. If a telescope is pointed in any direction, it cannot receive light older than that; therefore an ent.i.ty farther away must remain invisible. This doesn"t mean there is no existence beyond fifteen billion years. Strangely enough, certain faraway objects appear to be emitting radiation that is older than the universe, a fact cosmologists are unable to comprehend. If the human brain contains its own event horizon (the limit of photons to organize themselves as thought) and so does the cosmos, we must cross over to find the home of spirit.
A MAP OF THE SOUL.
In the dead of night I was awakened by the sound of screaming. Groggy as I was, I knew it must be coming from somewhere in the house, and my heart was pounding before I could sit up. Then someone flicked on the light above my bed.
"Come, get dressed, we have to leave," a half-familiar voice said. I didn"t move. It took a moment before I had enough presence of mind to realize that it wasn"t a scream I had heard but a wail.
"Come on," the voice repeated, this time more urgently. Strong arms picked me up and carried me out of the room. I was seven, and our neighbor in Bombay had come for me, but he didn"t tell me why. Instead the warm dampness of tropical air caressed over my face until we reached his house, where I was put to bed again.
This was the night my grandfather died. We called him Bauji, and he was famous for getting on the rooftop with his old military bugle, blasting the neighbors awake on the morning I was born. He died without warning at 3 A.M. The wailing came from the servants and women of the house. It was their way of beginning the long process that makes death acceptable, but that wasn"t a help to me. I had a reaction common to young children; I refused to believe what had happened. Just that day my grandfather had been jubilant. His son, my father, had been admitted into the Royal College of Physicians in London, a rare achievement for a native-born Indian in those days just after World War II. The minute he got the telegram, Grandfather swept me and my younger brother into his old black sedan and rushed us to not one but two movies (a Jerry Lewis movie and then Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). He had heaped so much candy and toys on us that my brother, Sanjiv, started to cry from sheer stress.
Yet within a day my grandfather was a cloud of ashes thrown into the river at the holy city of Hardwar-I refused to accept that. How could he be gone, who hardly a day before was sitting next to me in the dark laughing at All Baba"s antics?
A new and painful act in the family drama then ensued. My parents, who had left us out of their care during my father"s last phase of medical study, rushed back to India. There was lingering guilt that Grandfather had died of a heart attack, because ironically cardiology was my father"s specialization. And my brother Sanjiv got very ill, suffering from a skin malady that seemed to have no origin except the shock of recent events.
Now I understand that we were all worrying about my grandfather"s soul. We wondered where it had gone; we worried if it had suffered; deep down we might have been wondering if such a thing as the soul even existed. Such questions, in one form or another, have been hard for me to escape. The soul is the carrier that takes us beyond; it is the essence connecting us to G.o.d. But what do these words really mean?
In the ancient Vedas it says that the part of us that doesn"t believe in death will never die. This simple definition of the soul is not a bad one.
It accurately describes everyone"s secret belief that death may be real for some but not for us. Psychologists are impatient with this feeling of personal immortality. They claim that we use it to defend ourselves against the inescapable fact that one day we will die. But what if the opposite is true? What if feeling immortal and beyond death is the most real thing about us?
To prove this point one way or another, we need facts, just as we needed them about G.o.d. The soul is as mysterious as G.o.d, and we have just as few reliable facts about it. I would offer that the first fact about the soul is that it is not really as personal as people believe. The soul doesn"t feel or move; it doesn"t travel with you as you go about your life, nor does it endure birth, decay, and death. This is just a way of saying that the soul stands apart from ordinary experience. Since it also has no shape, getting a mental picture of the soul isn"t possible.
Instead, the soul is really a junction point between time and the timeless. (1) It faces in both directions. When I experience myself in the world, I am not experiencing my soul, yet it is somewhere on the periphery. There is no doubt that we sense its presence, however vaguely.