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Jun 12
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan. Read more... (474 words, 2 images, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)
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May 12
 SOCIETY AS SUPERORGANISM
I want to explore some ideas about the social and cultural aspects of morphic fields and morphic resonance. A familiar comparison might be that of a hive of bees or a nest of termites: each is like a giant organism, and the insects within it are like cells in a superorganism. Although comprised of hundreds and hundreds of individual insect cells, the hive or nest functions and responds as a unified whole.
My hypothesis is that societies have social and cultural morphic fields which embrace and organize all that resides within them. Although comprised of thousands and thousands of individual human beings, the society can function and respond as a unified whole via the characteristics of its morphic field. To visualize this, it is helpful to remember that fields by their very nature are both within and around the things to which they refer. A magnetic field is both within a magnet and around it; a gravitational field is both within the earth and around it. Field theories thus take us beyond the traditional rigid definition of “inside” and “outside.” Read more... (4648 words, 1 image, estimated 18:36 mins reading time)
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166 views
May 12
 In this essay, I am going to discuss the concept of collective memory as a background for understanding Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious only makes sense in the context of some notion of collective memory. This then takes us into a very wide-ranging examination of the nature and principle of memory-not just in human beings and not just in the animal kingdom; not even just in the realm of life-but in the universe as a whole. Such an encompassing perspective is part of a very profound paradigm shift that is taking place in science: the shift from the mechanistic to an evolutionary and wholistic world view.
The Cartesian mechanistic view is, in many ways, still the predominant paradigm today, especially in biology and medicine. Ninety percent of biologists would be proud to tell you that they are mechanistic biologists. Although physics has moved beyond the mechanistic view, much of our thinking about physical reality is still shaped by it-even in those of us who would like to believe that we have moved beyond this frame of thought. Therefore, I will briefly examine some of the fundamental assumptions of the mechanistic world view in order to show how it is still deeply embedded in the way that most of us think. Read more... (6897 words, 1 image, estimated 27:35 mins reading time)
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46 views
May 12
Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for the living and the dead–reinforces the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. Not only do traditions throughout the world share a belief that prayers may in some way help (or invoke help from) deceased ancestors, many cultures throughout history have believed that prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living.
If prayer affects things in the physical world, its effects should be measurable, and science should be able to investigate it. There is a very scattered literature on this, but when you bring it all together as Larry Dossey has done in his recent book, Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), you see there is quite a large number of interesting experiments with challenging results. Out of 131 controlled experiments on prayer-based healing, more than half showed statistically significant benefits. One of the best known is a double blind study of 393 patients in the coronary unit at San Francisco General Hospital. In this experiment, 192 patients, chosen at random, were prayed for by home prayer groups, the others were not. The prayed-for patients recovered better than the controls, and fewer died. Read more... (3457 words, 1 image, estimated 13:50 mins reading time)
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424 views
Jan 29
 IS MATHEMATICS DISCOVERED OR INVENTED?
Recently a heated debate between realists and relativists in science has erupted. The conflict is between those who see science as a rational description of the world converging on the truth, and those who argue that it is a socially constructed account of the world, and just one of many possible accounts. Typically scientists and philosophers of science are realists, arguing that science is approaching a true and accurate description of the real world, whereas social and cultural theorists support a relativist view of science, and argue that all knowledge of the world is socially constructed.
What has gone unnoticed in this debate is that there is a parallel and equally fundamental dispute over whether mathematics is discovered or invented. The absolutist view of mathematics sees it as universal, objective and certain, with mathematical truths being discovered through the intuition of the mathematician and then being established by proof. Many modern writers on mathematics share this view, including Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind, and John Barrow in Pi in the Sky, as indeed do most mathematicians. The absolutists support a ‘discovery’ view and argue that mathematical ‘objects’ and knowledge are necessary, perfect and eternal, and remark on the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics in providing the conceptual framework for science. They claim that mathematics must be woven into the very fabric of the world, for since it is a pure endeavour removed from everyday experience how else could it describe so perfectly the patterns found in nature? Read more... (2288 words, 1 image, estimated 9:09 mins reading time)
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345 views
Jan 07
“In the beginning,
trees were trees,
mountains were mountains,
and rivers were rivers.
Then came a time when trees were no longer trees, mountains were no longer mountains,
and rivers were no longer rivers.
Now, trees are once again trees,
mountains are once again mountains,
and rivers are once again rivers.”
- Zen saying
People sometimes tell me that they think this message is nihilistic. That it’s life-denying, that it separates the “absolute” from the “relative”, emphasises the absolute and denies the relative. Then again, there are many people who read my books and see that what I’m really talking about is unconditional love and unity and the end of all seeking. Anyway, I’m fascinated by the varying responses.
Sometimes the interpretations of what I write (or more correctly, what gets written!) do not at all match what is being communicated. Somebody recently hit the nail on the head when they suggested that upon hearing and believing the words “there is nothing to get”, someone might just go and commit suicide because life was pointless. It’s possible that the words could be taken that way. And at the same time, that would be to absolutely miss what the words are getting at. Violence – of any sort – is not being condoned here. Read more... (3373 words, 1 image, estimated 13:30 mins reading time)
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114 views
Jun 18
May we be those who shall renew this existence – Zarathustra
At the core of creation something is changing, coming alive in a new way. A light at the center of the world that has for millennia been dormant has been rekindled. This is the light of life itself waking up, remembering its own real nature and divine purpose. And with this awakening, the living being that is our world is undergoing a transformation in its very essence. The awakening of the light at the center of the world carries the potential for a whole new revelation, the possibility of a new way of living and being and relating to one another and to life. At this moment, we stand on the edge of a new stage in the evolution of life and consciousness, a new paradigm for the world. Life is one, has always been one. It is a single, living, organic wholeness and everything in creation is a part of it, as vitally and inseparably related to the whole of life as an individual cell or organ is related to the larger organism of which it is a part. Read more... (4120 words, 1 image, estimated 16:29 mins reading time)
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