By Geoff Olson

"True happiness comes not from a limited concern for one’s own well-being, or that of those one feels close to, but from developing love and compassion for all sentient beings." - The Dalai Lama

The future was so bright J. Robert Oppenheimer had to wear shades. On July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project director clipped on a pair of sunglasses and looked out over the New Mexico desert, awaiting the world’s first atomic test. As the mushroom cloud boiled up over the horizon, a line from The Bhagavad-Gita popped into the lanky scientist’s head: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

This wasn’t just the first memorable line of the atomic age. It was the intellectual preamble to the science and spirituality craze of later decades.

A passing reference to blue-skinned deities in the context of nuclear destruction was pretty obscure in the postwar environment of Howdy Doody and Edward R. Murrow. But the east-meets-west zeitgeist eventually took hold. 1975 saw the publication of Fritoj Capra’s The Tao of Physics, followed by Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters in 1979. These two tomes initiated the pop-culture program of bringing science and spirituality together, with a subsequent avalanche of texts for serious-minded seekers.

The results of this grand unification have been mixed, more often resembling a shotgun marriage than a marriage of convenience. Books with titles like The Quantum Self, Quantum Reality, and Quantum Healing popped up like toadstools in New Age bookstores. The Alice in Wonderland quality of the nano-world made for big box office, and anything with "quantum" in the title ensured gold at the end of the publishing rainbow.

Some scientists looked askance at the more enthusiastic claims in these popular accounts. Multiple dimensions and parallel universes were no longer theoretical - they were the bonafides for everything from ghosts to psychic healing to past lives. The science/spirituality bandwagon has also given us some interesting characters, like New Age author Gregg Braden, who cuts a dashing figure with his leonine hair, powersuit and PowerPoint presentation. In his book The Isaiah Effect, Braden sticks the shroud of Turin, quantum theory, human DNA, chi energy, and the Dead Sea scrolls into a metaphysical mixmaster, set to puree. Another messy cocktail of science and spirituality comes courtesy ET contactee/prophet Rael (Claude Vorihon), whose religious group pranked the global media a year ago with claims of cloning human beings.

A few accidents in the pop-culture kitchen don’t necessarily prove that science and spirituality are bad together on a plate. The past two decades have also given us the work of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, physicist David Bohm, psychologist Kenneth Ring and religious scholar Huston Smith.

Which are the right tools to find the truth? The cathedral or the computer? The meditation retreat or the particle accelerator? Whatever the tools of enquiry, the postmodernist optimist hopes that the science/spirit pairings won’t prove to be mutually exclusive.

"Even though the realms of religion and science are clearly marked off from each other," Einstein said, "nevertheless there exists between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies ... the situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Compare Einstein’s words with those of the Yogi Sri Aurobindo: "True reconciliation proceeds by a mutual comprehension leading to some sort of intimate oneness. It is therefore through the utmost possible unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling truth and so at some strongest foundation for a reconciling practice in the inner life of the individual and his outer experiences."

Although they may tend toward agnosticism or even atheism, professional scientists don’t hew to any one ideological line. Among Nobel-prize winning scientists, there are Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and representatives of all manner of faiths. Like anyone else, a practising scientist can "believe in six impossible things before breakfast," as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen said, without fear of it interfering with his or her professional life.

Werner Heisenberg, author of The Uncertainty Principle, expressed a belief that the scientists’ task is, or can be, a holy pursuit: "Physics is a reflection on the divine ideas of creation, therefore physics is a divine service. We are in our time very far from this theological foundation or justification of physics; but we still follow this method."

Heisenberg’s humility was undoubtedly influenced by the utterly bizarre nature of the quantum world, which makes the Bardo realm of Tibetan Buddhism seem like a trip across town. "Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it," said his colleague Niels Bohr.

This weirdness extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Many cosmologists theorize that the universe emerged out of a vacuum state; a void paradoxically containing energy, similar to the "plenum" of mystics. "Is it not shocking to know," wrote the Zen Buddhist teacher D.T. Suzuki, "all the heavens including all the luminaries whose lights are measured to reach this Earth after millions of years are said to be mere bubbles in the ocean of eternal emptiness?"

In 1456, the Christian mystic Nicholas of Cusa described a universe "where the circumference is nowhere and the centre is everywhere," anticipating the cosmological model of a finite but boundless universe by centuries.

Behind today’s spirituality/science movement is the hope of decoding God - or some transcendent force or purpose - using reason. Yet, prominent scientists occasionally jump on the spirituality/science bandwagon even when it doesn’t accord with their beliefs. In the film A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking’s computer-generated voice told of his scientific mission "to know the mind of God." This much-quoted line actually came from the mouth of a hard-nosed atheist: Hawking was simply using a literary/philosophical conceit for effect.

Whether it originates from a genuine expression of spiritual longing, or a publisher’s nudge over lunch, this God angle has been enjoying a decade-long vogue among science authors. Paul Davies, an Oxford mathematician, gave us The Mind of God in 1992, after authoring God and the New Physics. Another scientist, James Trefil penned Reading the Mind of God. Leon Lederman, director of Fermilab in Illinois, went for broke with The God Particle.

In some scientific quarters, an ultimate explanation for life, the universe and everything is now seen as attainable - perhaps within our lifetimes. Lederman says he hoped one day to see a simple list of equations explaining the universe that will "fit on a t-shirt."

Other scientists are more cautious in their estimates, and don’t expect an ultimate explanation anytime soon. Some believe nature will curmudgeonly conceal the final truth, and the scientific quest go on forever, with The Answer recursively retreating inward, like a nesting of Russian dolls. There are many scientists who believe metaphysical talk about a supreme being is simply outside the boundaries of what science can reasonably talk about. Others think it significant that organized religion has ceded significant ground to science, and that this process will continue until all superstition - God included - is scientifically dismissed.

Used to doing without a supreme being for so long, some scientists may now feel He may be explained away completely. Is some preemptory loss being felt in the halls of academe? For some materialists, losing God for good could leave them feeling like the administration of George Bush senior after the Berlin Wall fell; victorious, but already wondering who will fill the enemy’s shoes.

In the past 400 years, science has been extraordinarily successful in demoting the supreme being, or so it seems. Lyell and Hutton took geology out of His jurisdiction, and Darwin followed suit with biology. Already pushed back to the sphere of fixed stars by Galileo, and then sent scurrying into the intergalactic void by Edwin Hubble, God now finds a do-nothing posting in "quantum cosmology." Said by some to be inactive since the Big Bang, He may be worried that further discoveries will have Him moved further down the hall, or escorted off the premises after being made to hand over the keys to creation.

Stephen Hawking himself has said that the cosmos has no beginning or end, he can find no useful role for God in the universe: "what place then for a Creator?" It’s been a long, strange trip, from prime mover to cosmic deadwood.

In this viewpoint, God and spirituality are all in the head, and nowhere else. The new field of "neurotheology" attempts to isolate the brain receptors that allow us to access altered states of consciousness, and with them the imps of the imagination we fashion into gods and devils.

Yet, any skepticism felt for organized religion should be balanced with an understanding of the limits of knowledge. The provisional nature of science should make scientists themselves wary of any anticipated gnosis. Science, for all its advances, is an ever-finer approximation of a certain culture-bound cross-section of reality.

At the same time, it would be difficult to deny modern science has given us a more accurate picture of the world than that offered by medieval scholastics. We’re in a better position today to ask pertinent questions - certainly better than the individual who supposedly asked St. Augustine what God was doing before He created Heaven. "Creating Hell for those who ask such questions," was the cleric’s recorded response.

Physics and astronomy finds no direct evidence for a supreme being in its investigations - of course, that may have more to do with the nature of science than it has to do with any absence of God. There is of course, the other possibility: that the physicist’s popularized talk of God is more accurate than they know. Perhaps a Creator will figure prominently in the Ultimate Explanation in some fashion involving consciousness, which has a truly weird involvement with the quantum world. The words of British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane come to mind: "My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

One of the principle differences between spirituality, religion and science is the concept of the miraculous. Science will accept uncaused causes (as in subatomic particles that appear and disappear into the void, as long as they do so within Heisenberg’s time-energy constraints), but it has trouble with ultimate origins. The late Terrence McKenna, speaking of the Big Bang theory, imagined cosmologists saying, "just give us one miracle, and we can explain everything else!" Elsewhere, McKenna noted that tensor equations say little to us about the meaning of the universe we inhabit, certainly less than an aboriginal tale of some trickster-god who got drunk and "pissed the universe into existence."

Science does the how, but spirituality and religion do the why (opinions differ on how well they do it). Unlike science, they trade in narrative, and this is a crucial difference. When Oppenheimer witnessed the Godlike power of 20th century physics in the New Mexico desert, his scientific training simply wasn’t up to the task of describing the immensity of the moment. This is why he thought of the words of Krishna, who shows Arjuna a visual manifestation of all his incarnations and manifestations, including Death. For moments that shatter our sense of mundane reality, we require poetry, art and the mythic tales of creation and destruction.

Yet, the mathematical description of nature has its own narrative quality, in its own way as strange as anything from the Australian Aborigines’ dreamtime, or Rael’s ET visions.

In 1932, Sir James Jeans gave us a much-quoted assessment that still holds: "Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."

Jeans’ line about the universe being a "great thought" is not simply another empty rhetorical device, like Stephen Hawking’s "reading the mind of God." It expresses a mystery that has been deeply puzzling to scientists, who refer to it as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Why should this universe we live in be so in accord with equations scientists perceive as beautiful? Why should the universe slavishly follow numbers tracked in the heads of human beings?

A debate persists among pure mathematicians whether their objects of enquiry are just mental artifacts, or somehow "out there," in a Platonic realm of pure form. We all would all admit four apples on a table are more than an abstraction - there are four very real apples on one very real table. But what of entities like the square roots of negative numbers, or other mathematical will o’ the whisps that are necessary for the physicist’s description of the world, but have no correspondence with anything "real?" Is it significant that the further we plunge into our analysis of nature, the more "mind-like" it appears under our questioning?

James Jeans again: "Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts."

"This new knowledge compels us to revise our hasty first impression that we had stumbled into a universe which either did not concern itself with life or was actively hostile to life."

Cue the angelic choir. It’s important to note that on the basis of scientific evidence, Jeans’ estimate - where substance of the great thought that is the universe is consciousness itself - is no more heretical than the materialist’s dour view of a cosmos accidentally spat out of a space-time singularity, and stumbling purposelessly toward an entropic death.

"It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character," said the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who prided himself as a Quaker mystic. "But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct link to our experience, and all else is remote inference."

Eddington’s words are echoed by Buddha: "The external world is only a manifestation of the activities of the mind itself, and... the mind grasps it as an external world simply because of its habit of discrimination and false reasoning. The disciple must get into the habit of looking at things truthfully."

We don’t want to slip into solipsism, or confuse the map with the territory; the physicists’ equations are not the same as the cosmos itself. But it’s still worth asking - Hawking notwithstanding - are we reading the mind of God in our scientific pursuits, or just seeing our own reflections in the cosmic mirror? Or even more incredibly, funhouse distortions of one and the same, the central source who dreamed the whole circus up to begin with?

Reason may take us only so far in these journeys, before it swallows its own tail like a snake. "We should not let everything else atrophy in favour of one organ of rational analysis," said Heisenberg. "It is a matter, rather, of seizing upon reality with all the organs that are given to us, and trusting that this reality will then also reflect the essence of things, the "one, the good and the true."

Buddha said much the same thing: "Transcendental intelligence rises when the intellectual mind reaches its limit and if things are to be realized in their true and essential nature, its processes of thinking must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition."

This higher faculty might be called the direct apprehension of Mind itself, and a sense of cosmic unity. "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical," Einstein once said. "It is the power of all true art and science.

"He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men."

This mystical sense stands above and beyond discursive reasoning, but it is next to impossible to stop what meditators call "monkey-mind." Our limited hominid brains demand neat, tidy answers. Is there a God? And what is God - immanent, transcendent, or even conceivable? Where is God, or whatever you want to call Him, Her or It (Mind at Large, the Divine Imagination, The Indefinable Whatever)? Is God in the infernos of distant stars, or among physicists’ infinitely small whorls of 10-dimensional "string?" Everywhere and nowhere at once? And what kind of lunatic creator would allow such pain and suffering to go on on our bizarro planet to begin with?

What if embodied consciousness is the divine imagination playing hide and seek from itself, maintaining the illusion of separate selves to keep itself company? And what if the principal hiding place is the slyest one conceivable, in the hearts of all sentient beings?

Perhaps the union of science and spirituality is not meant to birth any one ultimate answer, but rather a whole new family of questions.

Do not look for God,
Look for the one
Looking for God.
But why look at all?
He is not lost.
He is right here,
Closer than your own breath.
- Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist. He can be reached at gefo@telus.net