Kick a football and you intuitively know where it will end up, based on the strength of your kick and the angle. You kick the ball up - it flies into the air, reaches its zenith, and arcs back down towards the ground with a velocity of 9.8 metres per second per second. We can similarly intuit how it will bounce. Like the analogy of the billiard table to describe Newtonian (or classical) physics, we understand it perfectly without having to know the mathematics describing the forces, vectors and masses involved.
But imagine kicking it skywards and watching it accelerate away from you with ever-increasing speed, in contravention of the gravitational pull of the Earth. This is what's happening at the cosmic scale - galaxies are flying apart from one another faster and faster - in contravention of Newtonian physics, which suggests that the acceleration should slow down and the Universe should contract in upon itself. To explain why the Universe is expanding at an ever-increaing rate, science has had to invent Dark Energy, something that no one can see or feel or detect in any way. Dark energy is essentially no more than a mathematical framework can make sense of our observations. Without hypothetical dark energy, the laws of physics make no sense when looking out into the fringes of the observable Universe.
And then there's the subatomic realm. The billiard balls you understand. But within the atom, there is the electron, which can behave like either a wave or a particle until someone intervenes to check which it is - and at that very instant it becomes one or the other. Until an observer takes a look, the electron's position or its momentum is no more than a probability. And this is almost incomprehensible. Yet this is the basic premise of quantum mechanics, which has been with us for the best part of a century, a scientifically established fact, proven thousands of times over in labs all over the world - but try to interpret it philosophically - there's no consensus.
Einstein and Heisenberg didn't overturn Newton. Classical physics wasn't supplanted by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, in the way that alchemy was displaced by chemistry - it was bracketed by them. They explained that which is happening far beyond the edge of our own galaxy and the behaviour of particles which are too small for us to comprehend. And yet science has yet to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity - in particular, gravity's place within the subatomic realm, and gravity's relationship with the other three fundamental forces - electromagnetic interaction, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions.
With the certainties of Newtonian physics undermined, we feel free to look for answers beyond the straightjacket of reductionist materialism.
The ancients had an instinctive rather than rational understanding of the world. The secret of the famous hermetic text, the Emerald Tablet - the notion that as above, so below - could be taken to mean the mystery of the galactic and the subatomic. In between the macro and the micro, there is our own human scale - that which we have always been able to perceive with our unaugmented, pre-technological Mk. 1 Eyeball. From the smallest grain of sand to a sky full of stars. Since the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that it spawned, the human scale has become our domain; over the past three hundred years we have achieved mastery over much that resides within it.
That mastery has resulted in a rich material world, one that satisfies the ego. We surround ourselves with things that we think should bring up happiness and status, and we organise our lives accordingly. God, as purveyed by religion, has largely failed; rational materialism has taken the place of supernatural 'magical thinking'.
By dismantling the sense of magic around us and replacing it with explainable matter, we have lost much as a species. We have lost touch with the world around us, the world that 'primitive' peoples feel they are an intrinsic part of, rather than masters of. Our pre-industrial forefathers might not have lived in a technological civilisation, but all of them, every one, implicitly believed in the supernatural. Having been born into a technological civilisation, we feel can comfortably jettison those unnecessary beliefs in the supernatural and the metaphysical, because our egos are more than adequately compensated by material rewards.
But look at the price we pay - and the price our planet - is paying - for rejecting the spiritual.
Yet this is not the time to swing the other way and reject technology and material goods, but to optimise them; above all it is also high time we reconnected with our consciousness, which in its otherness from our ego is as different as quantum mechanics is from Newtonian physics.
The thing with meta-classical physics is that it is literally beyond one's grasp - we can no more peer inside the atom's 'shell' as we can see (without the most powerful of telescopes) the farthest reaches of the Universe. And so - it doesn't concern our everyday life, which is locked into the Newtonian frame of reference. The classical world is the world of our biology; our biology predicates our ego. Our consciousness - pure, and untouched by biology - is what we'd have in common with the person we'd be had our parents never met.
I can imagine an advanced civilisation in which innate 'magical thinking' wasn't rejected, but instead was fine-tuned over millennia into psychic powers that work in conjunction with technology. Here on Planet Earth, the triumph of technology over mysticism has left mankind in a dead end, denying the spiritual side of our natures, we end up nursing anxieties and neuroses that are entirely unnecessary. Wanting things we can't afford and getting into debt to finance them.
We should consider consciousness in the context of meta-classical physics - everything that is science, yes, and rational, but beyond Newton. Consciousness as quantum phenomenon, perhaps - or an intrinsic building block of Universal reality - rather than in the context of reductionist materialism. Some voices would have you believe that your consciousness is no more than an epiphenomenon resulting from emergent complexity, that is limited to the human brain and to a lesser extent to the brains of higher-order animals. But I believe it runs far deeper than that.
Accept the mystery of meta-classical physics and you'll be better placed to accept the supernatural, the numinous, the Divine. Revel in the primacy of your subjective conscious experience.
This time last year:
The Sun and Snow
This time two years ago:
Farewell to my father's car
Notes from the Arena of the Unwell
This time five years ago:
The magic of a dawn flight
This time six years ago:
Warsaw as a voivodship
This time eight years ago:
Around town in the snow
This time ten years ago:
Reference books are dead
This time 11 years ago:
A winter walk to work, and wet socks
Blue Monday
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