by Tam Hunt
January-October  2015

from Collective-Evolution Website

Spanish version

Part 1

The Source

January 3, 2015

"The search for the 'one', for the ultimate source of all understanding, has doubtless played a similar role in the origin of both religion and science."

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Nobel Prize winner for physics
 

As a teenager, I first began engaging intellectually with the world with the philosophy sections of bookstores and libraries, avidly inspecting books for pearls of wisdom.

If a philosopher dared to mention spirituality or God, I would consider the book misplaced and not relevant to my philosophical questions. I was, for some time, an avid atheist, embracing the modern scientific and philosophical trend that has become quite pervasive.

My how things change.

I have realized in my own personal journey that examinations of God and spirituality are part and parcel of philosophy, if we define philosophy as the broad endeavor to understand the universe and our place in it.

There are many functions of philosophy, to be sure, but this is as good a definition of philosophy as I have found.

No Need for a God Hypothesis in The Eyes of Materialist Science

Any rational inquiry into the nature of the universe and our place in it - which includes science as a more specialized form of philosophy - must face one of the most basic questions:

how does complexity arise?

It seems that it must arise from simplicity.

At the very least this is the phenomenon we see all around us: simpler constituents generating more complex forms through combination, separation, and emergence.

• What place should God have in this story of simplicity producing complexity?

• Can't we explain the universe in terms of merely matter, energy and space?

In a word, no.

The modern scientific and philosophical trend has generally been to whittle away God's role in the world. Modern science, with Galileo, Newton, Descartes, etc., began this trend by defining the scientific pursuit as rational inquiry into God's work.

This inquiry was, and is, all about discovering the rules that govern the world.
 

The broadest hypothesis of modern science and of the modern era more generally was that the world is regular and rational, i.e., it operates through discernible rules. This hypothesis has generally been borne out, as evidenced by the marvels of technology all around us.

By discovering the rules that govern the world, many early philosophers and scientists supposed, we explain the handiwork of God and perhaps even the mind of God.

Over time, this hypothesis became stronger and in the 19^th Century many scientists and philosophers became overtly atheistic.

Rather than viewing the universe as the handiwork of God, many came to view the universe as inherently without design and without a creator. We may never know what caused the universe to come to be, it was thought, but we certainly could explain everything worth explaining without invoking God.

Laplace, an early 19^th Century French materialist scientist and philosopher stated, when asked by Napoleon what place God had in his system:

"I had no need for that hypothesis."

Nietzsche crowned this trend in the 19^th Century with his pronouncement that "God is dead."

Even though large majorities of Americans today proclaim belief in God in some manner, the general view among the cultural elite of scientists and philosophers is that God is indeed dead and that the universe can be explained entirely through various permutations of mindless matter, which combine in complex forms like humans to produce very complex minds.

The problems with this view, known generally as scientific materialism or materialist reductionism, are fleshed out in my book, Eco, Ego, Eros, which attempted to show how modern science went astray by intentionally or unintentionally excluding mind from its explanations in many different fields.

A Shifted Perspective - Does All Matter Have Mind?

My intellectual journey took a sharp turn when I began thinking seriously about the nature of mind.

I began reading in this area in my late teens and have continued to this day, over twenty years now. When I realized what I consider to be the fatal problems in the materialist worldview with respect to explaining the nature of mind and matter, I also realized that a far better explanation is found in the view that all matter has some degree of mind attached.

Where there is matter there is mind and where there is mind there is matter. It's all a matter of degree, of complexity. In most cases, matter and mind are extremely rudimentary, but as matter complexifies, so mind complexifies (generally).

This view is known as panpsychism or panexperientialism and it turned out that this philosophical position is also a universal acid for resolving all manner of philosophical and scientific problems, and spiritual problems.

This is a key step in my argument in this essay, so the interested reader should, if not already convinced of the problems facing the materialist view of the world, and its "emergence" theory of mind, review parts I through IV of my series on absent-minded science.

I realized, in reading through the works of Alfred North Whitehead and David Ray Griffin, two well-known panpsychists, that the process that leads to our complex mind is unlikely to stop at our level of complexity. There may be, and probably are, many levels of complexity higher than our level.

It's a matter of scale, as Whitehead and Griffin themselves discuss.

This knowledge leads to some interesting possibilities when we consider spatial and temporal scales far beyond the human level.

Source & Summit

A major problem with traditional notions of God in the western tradition is that He (she, it) is invariably presented as already extremely complex, perhaps the most complex (and powerful) entity that exists.

This puts the cart before the horse if God is not simply to be accepted as complex from the outset and thus to be considered outside of any rational inquiry. There are many areas of human inquiry where rationality must at least in part bow to intuition and faith; spirituality is certainly one of those areas, but this is not an all or nothing kind of thing.

Rationality may certainly shed some light on these issues even if intuition and faith also play a role.

It seems that God, in a rational approach to spirituality, must be explained in an evolutionary manner. In other words, how did God become complex? It seems clear that any kind of conscious God worthy of the name is necessarily highly complex. We need to be clear, however, in what we mean by "God."

Does God have to be conscious?

David Ray Griffin writes about "twin ultimates," Ken Wilber about "Source and Summit."

That is, there are two types of divinity:

• the ground (Source)

• the sky (Summit)

Another apt metaphor, perhaps even more apt than the metaphysical ground is an "ocean of being."

In this ocean of being metaphor what each of us experiences as manifest reality, including ourselves and all other physical things, is represented by the waves on that infinitely deep ocean.

The deeper we go in that ocean the closer we come to pure being, devoid of any distinctions at all.

The Source and Summit enclose all of reality and we exist at some middle level of reality. Where exactly we exist, we'll never know because even if we succeed in scaling any particular summit we can never know if there are not higher summits beyond.

The Source is, in my view, more fundamental than the Summit and is probably not conscious; that is, there is no subjective awareness in Source.

The Source is the ground of being, the soil from which all things grow or the ocean from which all waves/particles manifest (pick your preferred metaphor). The Source is far simpler than notions of God as a complex being ("God as Summit" in the framework I'm sketching here).

There are many lines of reasoning that seem to require some kind of ground, a foundation for the universe.

Here are a few:

• Quantum theory suggests that our universe is comprised of a seething mass of quanta that pop in and out of existence.

   

  Rather than suggest that these particles (and all of reality with them) simply pop into existence from nothing, it is more reasonable to suggest that there is a ground of pure potentiality from which they grow; this isn't nothingness.
   

• Similarly, the prevailing view of our universe's origin, the Big Bang theory, suggests that a "primordial egg" appeared and expanded rapidly to eventually form all that we observe around us.

   

  Where did this egg come from? Rather than positing that it came from literally nothing, it is more reasonable to suggest that it came from a more basic level of reality, the ground of being, pure potentiality.
   

• A more recent development provides additional support for a ground of being: entanglement/non-locality.

   

  This phenomenon, first raised by Einstein as an objection to quantum theory, has been well-established experimentally. Entangled particles exhibit non-local behavior because they appear to affect each other instantaneously or near instantaneously at speeds far faster than the speed of light.

   

  How does this influence work? There is a very healthy debate surrounding these issues, but it is again reasonable to suggest that this influence is mediated by the ground of being or what Einstein called at times "the new ether."
   

• In process philosophy, the most sophisticated panpsychist thinking, which emphasizes the temporal nature of all actual things (process), we must have something that forms the basis for process.

   

  Whitehead called the ultimate of his system creativity and the process by which the universe is created in each moment is the creative advance. Creativity and the creative advance are equivalent to the Source, as I'm using that term here

There are other lines of reasoning, but this should suffice for now. If we accept these lines of reasoning, we realize that the mainstream ontology that consists essentially of only matter, energy and space is insufficient.

We must add the ground to our list and it is in fact more fundamental than matter, energy and space because it is what produces matter, energy and space.

Explaining Complexity

In approaching the ground/Source from an evolutionary perspective we are, then, still confronted with explaining complexity from simplicity.

The ground must have some degree of complexity built in if it can produce all the marvels of our universe, what can be labeled in this case "primordial complexity."

Given this degree of complexity, is the Source, the ground of being, simply to be accepted with no further explanation? It seems that the answer is yes.

The ground of being is the ultimate "brute fact."

There is nothing below the ground of being. There is only an above.

• Why is there something rather than nothing?

• Why is there anything at all, including our entire universe?

The answer: because there is a ground of being.

This is the role that the ground plays in my ontology. It is the level below which there is nothing further.

While the ground's primordial complexity cannot be denied, we can console ourselves that the ground is as simple as possible, but no simpler. That is, to have the universe we know from direct experience we must accept some degree of primordial complexity.

We don't, however, have to accept the kind of complexity evident in Western notions of God, but we must accept some type of complexity "built in" from the beginning if we accept the ground of being as a necessary part of our ontology.

We have a universe and some things in that universe are simply brute facts that cannot be further explained.

Even if we accept the ground of being as without beginning and without end (presumably), we can never rule out the possibility that the ground itself evolves. We can never say that it didn't start simple and become complex over the eons.

We may in fact gain new insights in coming decades or centuries with respect to the origin of this realm beneath our feet, but for now it seems fair to state that we must at least accept the brute fact of its existence.

The ground of being has many names:

• in modern physics, it is the "quantum vacuum" or just the vacuum, representing pure potentiality

• to Anaximander, an influential pre-Socratic philosopher it was apeiron

• to Plato and Plotinus it was the One

• to ancient Hindu philosophers and mystics it was Brahman

• to some schools of Buddhist thought it was Adibuddha or Emptiness

• to Jewish Kabbalah it was Ein Sof

• for Hegel and other Idealists it was the Absolute

• for Jung it was the unus mundus

• in Christian philosophy the ground of being is either the ground of being (Tillich) or agennetos (Origen)

Whatever name we prefer they all refer to the same concept: the ground from which all else grows.

And this is as good a definition of God as any.







 

Part 2

The Summit
January 06, 2015

[God] has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom.

Alfred North Whitehead

Process and Reality (1929)

What is the ultimate nature of reality? And how does it interact with each of us?

My last column introduced the idea of "twin ultimates," the notion that there are two types of divinity worthy of our consideration.

• The first, the more fundamental type of divinity, may be referred to as the ground of being, the Source, God's "primordial" nature (as in the Whitehead quote above), or any of a number of other names from various philosophical, scientific or spiritual traditions. The ground of being is the metaphysical soil from which all actuality grows.

   

• The other ultimate, the Summit, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum of being and becoming. The Summit is closer to traditional western notions of God and God is as good a name as any other for this ultimate.

This essay will explore the Summit in more detail and compare Source and Summit.

As with all of my essays, I appeal both to science and spirituality in my explanations. This is the case because I don't believe there is any fundamental distinction between science, philosophy and spirituality.

To be sure, there are differences in current practice and focus, but in terms of conceptual structures, if not all their methods, these endeavors should be essentially the same ("should" being the essential word here).

By this I mean that the "deep science" (to use Ken Wilber's term) that meshes science, philosophy and spirituality together relies on logic, intuition, faith and facts - recognizing that all human endeavors are a mix of these tools.

The deep science that reconciles science and spirit doesn't ignore inconvenient facts, nor does it elevate reason above all other tools as the only source of legitimate knowledge.

Deep science recognizes that all our attempts at understanding should be empirically based as much as possible, but it also recognizes that some sources of knowledge lie beyond empiricism and even beyond logic.

Defining the contours of where facts and reason should give way to intuition and faith is an entirely personal matter. I tend to the intellectual and rational approach in my own explanations (particularly in these essays), while acknowledging that logic has limits; but I have no independent basis for preferring this prioritization.

It's entirely personal.

The Summit

We are predisposed in thinking about the nature of solidity to think of the stuff around us as far more solid than it really is.

Though it is commonly known now that we are each comprised of massive numbers of molecules and atoms, and what we think of as solid molecules and atoms are in fact extremely sparsely populated regions of space, this truth has not reverberated as far as it should.

We are mostly empty space, and when I say mostly, I mean 99.999999% or more.

We, as human beings, are mostly vast voids of emptiness, with tiny isolated specks of matter dispersed at distant intervals. Moreover, we don't even know what matter "really is."

As I wrote in an earlier essay, the mind-body problem presupposes that we've solved the "body problem" (the nature of matter) - but we haven't.

• Is matter really condensed energy (Heisenberg) or really fields (Einstein) or tiny vibrating strings, as modern string theory suggests?
   

• Or is matter really a projection of an underlying neutral substrate, the ground, as I argued in my last column?

This means that matter arises as quantum fluctuations from the ground of being and these quantum fluctuations constitute matter but also mind.

That is, each unit of nature has dual aspects of both mind and matter. The process that produces each quantum fluctuation leads, as the hierarchy of complexity is scaled, to more complex structures like gnats, rats, bats, cats and eventually humans.

This process does not, however, have to stop at the human level. Clearly there are physical structures in the universe far larger than us, such as planets, stars, galaxies, superclusters, etc., and possibly infinite universes beyond our own that comprise the grandest scale of all: the multiverse (see Brian Greene's latest book, The Hidden Reality).

Tradition suggests that there is no mind present in such supra-human organizations; they consist of mindless matter, as do sub-human levels of complexity. But this is an unjustified prejudice that results from basic philosophical mistakes at the beginning of the modern era.

When we recognize that the better solution to the mind-body problem acknowledges that all matter has some type of mind attached, we recognize also that supra-human levels of organization may also have some type of mind attached.

• Can the entire universe have a mind?

• Could the universe itself, with its vast swaths of empty space be akin to the structure of humans with our own vast swaths of empty space?

I don't know, but I do know that the conceptual structure that best explains the human level of mind does not in any way preclude the possibility of a universal mind.

Let me explain in more detail.

Mind at its most basic level consists of a subject, an object and a link between the two. Consciousness necessarily implies "consciousness of." That is, each subject must have at least one object to be a subject. And there must be some causal link between subject and object to have any such relation.

At the human level, we call this causal link perception and we can explain it in purely physical terms as the transmission of information about the world around us through our senses into our internal theater, which is transformed into a picture of the world unique to each of us.

This process is not, however, limited to humans.

What we call perception can legitimately be applied to an electron. The electron perceives its environment insofar as it responds to physical forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism.

Why is this not normally called perception? Because "perception" implies the presence of a mind...

But in the panpsychist view of the universe there is no qualitative difference between an electron's reception of information from its environment and a human's perception of information from her environment because each has some type of mind.

The mind in both consists of the same process:

a subject receiving/perceiving information from its environment.

These processes are surely very different in the degree of consciousness present with such perception but the idea is that both share the same quality of a subject (however simple) receiving/perceiving the world around it.

Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist, stated succinctly:

"[M]ind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call 'chance' when made by electrons."

Dyson recognized also that the process that creates mind need not stop at the human level, stating in his 1979 book, Infinite in All Directions:

"I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

God is, then, what we call mind at the level far beyond the human level.

Universal mind surely deserves the name of God. This is the Summit in the system I am describing here. It is made conceptually possible due to the recognition that causality itself, which is the link between subject and object, has no limitation to the human level.

Does universal consciousness operate at the same timeframe as humans? I don't know. Does it interact with us in any significant way? I don't know.

Perhaps this universal consciousness, if it exists, operates at a vastly slower pace. Perhaps it cares not a whit about humans or other life on other far-flung planets. But perhaps it does.

Perhaps it's not even here yet and perhaps it's our role to bring the Summit into existence, a collective co-creation of God. I have no personal evidence of God as Summit so I remain agnostic about its existence.

My key point here is to show that there is nothing particularly irrational about the idea of conscious beings at levels far higher than the human level.

Unconscious Source, Conscious Summit

It seems that the Source is itself unconscious. The Summit must, however, be conscious given the framework I've sketched here.

The Rig Veda, the oldest Hindu texts, supports the notion of the Source (Brahman) as unconscious:

Neither death nor immortality was there then [in the very beginning],
No sign of night or day.
That One breathed, windless, by its own energy:
Nought else existed then

…

In the beginning this [One] evolved,
Became desire, first seed of mind.
Wise seers, searching within their hearts,
Found the bond of Being in Not-being.

I think of the Source as pure potentiality.

It is only when matter/mind bubbles up into actuality from the depths of pure potentiality that consciousness arises. Reality consists, then, in a spectrum from pure potentiality to complete actuality.

This conceptual structure allows us to respect Occam's Razor - explanations should be as simple as possible - while also explaining how complexity and consciousness arise from simplicity and non-conscious processes.

A Consistent Vision of Science & Spirituality

Beyond the purely intellectual understanding of the Source and Summit, we should, as thinking and feeling beings, ponder what good this understanding achieves?

The highest good it can achieve is a different type of knowledge than purely intellectual understanding, what can be described as gnosis.

I use this Greek term, typically associated with the Gnostic sects of early Christianity and pre-Christianity, because it best typifies what West and East share in terms of a deeply emotional and spiritual understanding of the nature of God.

Other terms for gnosis include,

• satori

• Samadhi

• moksha

• nirvana

• enlightenment

• or simply "awakening"

Erwin Schrödinger, perhaps the most spiritually attuned of the major 20^th Century physicists, is worth quoting at length on gnosis.

From "The I That Is God":

I - I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' - am the person who controls the motion of the atoms according to the Laws of Nature…the insight is not new.

 

The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition Atman = Brahman (the personal self equals the omnipresent)… was in Indian thought considered to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world…

 

Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: Deus factus sum (I have become God).

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in the Vedanta…

 

[I]nconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole…

 

This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you…

'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.'

 

Part 3
Of Eros and Ideas
October 21, 2015
 

If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world, and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of a reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness - that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is, at root, one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)

"Mind Stuff"

Is there a deeper transcendent reality than the normal world around us? If there is, can we know it in any meaningful way?

The first two parts of this series delved into the Source and Summit as the twin ultimates that enfold our world of normal experience between them. The Source, the ground of being, is the metaphysical soil from which all actuality grows.

The Summit is the more speculative type of divinity, the ultimate mind of God. This third part in my series on the Anatomy of God will delve further into the notion of God as Source and examines how Eros, the creativity of the universe, meshes with the Source.

Is there really a hidden reality, a Source, behind the world of sensible experience? Let's start by looking to modern physics, keeping in mind that my goal here in these essays is to craft a coherent marriage between science and spirituality.

Brian Greene's 2013 book, The Hidden Reality, examines many contemporary notions of the multiverse and argues for a new and expanded notion of how science should be conducted. The "multiverse" is a term that captures various notions of reality that go beyond the traditional observable universe, including additional universes existing in space beyond our ability to observe them or in different dimensions beyond our own.
 

Greene argues that even if we cannot ever directly measure other universes, we may infer their reality from various lines of reasoning.

He argues, therefore, against a strict observational and falsificationist notion of proper science, which has held sway for many decades now, at least rhetorically if not always in practice.

Greene does not, however, include in his survey of multiverse theories any discussion of what has been a pervasive and constant debate in both the West and East: the notion that there is a hidden reality beneath our feet, or above our heads, or just to the side of our vision - which is what I have called the Source.

This isn't "just" a spiritual or religious debate. It's also a straightforward philosophical and scientific debate about the nature of reality.

What I'm getting at is the idea that there is a realm that produces everything that we can detect, which is not directly detectable. Yet we can reasonably infer its existence by its effects.

This realm, which I've called in these essays the Source, Brahman, ether, etc., is the very ground of being, or ocean of being if we prefer a watery metaphor over an earthy one. Whereas the actual universe comprised of what we currently call matter and energy is directly detectable, the ground of being can't be directly detected in a traditional manner.

It can, however, be detected indirectly.

Plato's Cave

In the Western world, this debate finds its earliest and perhaps still best exemplification with Plato's allegory of 'The Cave.'

Plato described in his book, The Republic (which is an extended discussion about the nature of government, the state, and leadership), reflections about the nature of reality.

Plato asks us to imagine a person who is forced to live in a cave all of his life and is completely tied down, to the point where his eyes are forced to look ahead at all times. This unfortunate person must watch the back of the cave, on which shadows are produced from a fire's bright light behind the prisoner.

The captors perform their routine activities behind the prisoner and their shadows are cast on the wall. The prisoner, knowing no other reality, mistakes the shadows for reality, not realizing they are shadows cast by the captors behind him.

This is, for Plato, an allegory about our real lives: we mistake the world around us for primary reality when there is a deeper reality that we can infer through properly applied reason.

The deeper reality was, for Plato, the realm of Forms, or Ideas (the terms are synonymous in this context). Forms are the true reality behind the sensible forms we can detect directly.

As strange as it sounds to modern ears, Plato believed that a table is only a table insofar as it participates in, and is a shadow of, the archetypal Form of 'tableness,' and so on for everything we witness around us, from trees, to rivers, up to and including abstractions like truth, goodness, and beauty.

When we find something to be beautiful it is because it participates in the archetypal Beauty.

The highest Form was, for Plato, the Good, and The Republic is an extended discussion of how individuals and the state can work toward realizing the Good in our shadow realm that we call everyday reality.

Plato's most direct argument for the existence of Forms is in the Cratylus dialogue (389):

Socrates
What has the carpenter in view when he makes a shuttle? Is it not something the nature of which is to weave?

Hermogenes
Certainly.

Socrates
Well, then, if the shuttle breaks while he is making it, will he make another with his mind fixed on that which is broken, or on that form with reference to which he was making the one which he broke?

Hermogenes
On that form, in my opinion.

Socrates
Then we should very properly call that the absolute or real shuttle?

Hermogenes
Yes, I think so.

From our modern perspective, it seems that Plato went too far with his theory of Forms.

To imagine that there is literally an archetypal and eternal shuttle Form in a timeless realm sounds, frankly, a bit silly to our modern ears. The manifest task of science and philosophy is to explain how simplicity produces complexity. And to posit complex archetypes as eternally existing objects in a parallel realm fails in this task, for many reasons.

Nevertheless, there are some ways in which Plato's ideas still have some relevance.

We can, with a more modern twist, think of the realm of Forms as, collectively, the ground of being that produces sensible reality.

This process begins with the subatomic particles that appear and disappear in uncountable hordes in every part of space, according to modern quantum theory. This process leads, through many levels of complexification, up to the rarefied heights of stars and humans. And it wouldn't happen without the ground to make it grow.

Modern physics has, over the last century, gone to great lengths to deny this hidden reality beneath our feet.

While Einstein did not begin this trend, he is well-known for dismissing the "ether" (which was thought to be the carrier of light waves, among other things) as "superfluous" in his 1905 paper on special relativity.

While Einstein himself quickly reversed course and embraced a "new ether" concept from 1916 onward, most physicists and philosophers relished the notion of being able to simplify our physical theories by denying the reality of the ether.

A New Ether?

Whatever we prefer to call the ether/ground of being, however, it is certainly making a comeback in recent years.

Greene, writing about the recent efforts to detect the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, states:

Roughly speaking, the mass of a particle, much like the mass of a truck, is the resistance you'd feel were you to push on it.

 

The question is, where does this resistance come from? The answer, according to Higgs's idea, is that all of space is filled with an invisible substance - the Higgs field - which acts kind of like a pervasive molasses, exerting a drag force as particles try to accelerate through it.

 

The "stickier" a particle is, the more the molasses-like Higgs field affects it, and the more massive the particle appears. The emptiest of empty space, vacuumed clean of matter and radiation, would still be permeated by the Higgs field.

An "invisible substance," a "pervasive molasses," a field that permeates the "emptiest of empty space."

This sounds like an ether to me, but it doesn't really matter what we call this underlying reality.

I would modify Greene's description only to state that rather than the Higgs field permeating empty space, empty space is more accurately conceived as the manifestation of the Source, the ground of being, the ether. In both Greene's framing and my framing, there is not really any "empty space."

Rather, what we think of as empty isn't empty at all when we consider the properties that we know space has, such as the ability to produce virtual particles.

Stephen Hawking writes, in discussing our modern theory of gravity, general relativity, that the theory proposes that,

"gravity gives rise to the structure of space itself. To put this plainly, gravity is defined even in 'empty' space, and thus, there must be something" even in empty space.

He adds:

"That 'something' is the ether, or, in modern language, a field… In many respects, this is one of the most important contributions of relativity to physics. In the modern view, all forces arise from fields. In quantum theory… the particles themselves arise from the field."

Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT, writes in his 2008 book The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces:

No presently known form of matter has the right properties [to play the role of the ether]. So we don't really know what this new material ether is.

 

We know its name: the Higgs condensate [or Higgs field], after Peter Higgs, a Scots physicist who pioneered some of these ideas. The simplest possibility… is that it's made from one new particle, the so-called Higgs particle.

 

But the [ether] could be a mixture of several materials… [T]here are good reasons to suspect that a whole new world of particles is ripe for discovery, and that several of them chip in to the cosmic superconductor, a.k.a the Higgs condensate.

As the title of Wilczek's book suggests:

he argues from many lines of evidence that there is in fact an ether that undergirds space, which he calls alternately the ether, the Grid, or the "cosmic superconductor."

The recent work detecting the Higgs field certainly supports Wilczek's ideas.

This discussion may convince even skeptics that modern physics finds a great deal of support for the existence of a realm deeper than what we can observe directly.

Fields of folly?

I suggested in Part I far above, of this series that the Source is not itself conscious, so again we are in no way violating physical principles by equating today's notion of the sum of fields with the spiritual notion of Source.

However, even if we are convinced that there is a hidden physical reality behind or below manifest reality, we should not rely on a facile argument that God as Source lies in these hidden fields.

Rather, we can and should rely on the realization that all of reality does, under the updated worldview of today's physics, indeed grow from these hidden fields and this is the same idea as,

• the Source

• ground of being

• ocean of being

• akashic field

• apeiron

• ether, etc.,

...in various spiritual traditions.

The creative advance in each moment is this Source expressing itself, a process that we can describe as the Eros of the universe. We are all contributing our own vision to Eros and our collective human efforts are an increasingly important part of this unfolding creativity.

There is some risk in tying timeless spiritual concepts to modern physics because we know that modern physics is always changing, and will continue to change.

My feeling, however, is that modern physics is now at a point where it is catching on to the broader truths that logic and spiritual experience have revealed to philosophers and spiritual explorers over the millennia.

While we'll never have a perfect match between science and spirituality, it is gratifying to see these often conflicting domains coming closer together in terms of their descriptions of deep reality.