Our world always seems to be on the brink of one form of trouble or another.

Yet, often surprisingly so, we seem to recover only to face a new challenge.  Could it be

that this apparent dance macabre arises from our global failure to re-envision the world

as a spiritual manifestation?  Can our predicament be due to our Western-scientific-based

belief that the world and all its phenomena, including life and mind, fundamentally

emerge out of matter?  Could it be that with a different worldview things might get

better?  In this short essay, I will examine this belief and indicate what we might expect if

we were to accept the counter-idea that matter, mind, and life all arose from a far more

complex entity called spirit or consciousness.

In brief, something called consciousness provides the fundamental ground of

being out of which all physical and mental phenomena emerge.  Although many

spiritually-inclined people may take this view, it doesn’t seem to fit with common beliefs

coming from scientific reasoning.  But what about most of the world’s non-science-based

beliefs (if even anything like a world belief system can be imagined)?  Do you the reader

actually believe that mind or consciousness came first?  Or perhaps better put, could such

a view have any scientific, spiritual, or even logical foundation?  And even if it did,

would this change your view or your way of life (or the world’s)?

Scientific views posit that somehow more complex lifeforms evolved from

simpler lifeforms—those that existed before.  This conviction, based as it is on a two

prevailing belief structures—evolution in biology and reductionism in physical science,

state that complexity emerges from simplicity—order arises from disorder.

One might argue that nothing is simple about disorder or complex about order.

However, certainly complex organization, even though it may appear chaotic, exhibits

great order.  Take a string of ones and zeros making up a computer’s code, for example.

A cursory glance at it shows it to be disorderly but we know that not to be the case.

(Otherwise how could a computer program work?)  It thus seems that complexity and

order are joined at the waist, so to speak; hence, conversely, simplicity and chaos must

equally be joined.  One more remark:  As a teacher I am often praised by students

because I seem to make the complex simple through word and metaphor.  In actual fact, I

may be doing the opposite.  I simply raise out of the chaotic (and usually simply

configured and often incorrect) mire of unclear notions—in which most nonscientists

embed scientific concepts—metaphorical descriptions that these nonscientists do hold or

believe in.

 

Thus it appears as a scientific axiom (an unquestionable belief) that order and

complex structures, including movements and cycles, arise out of simpler and more

chaotic structures and movement.  This belief holds for the big bang cosmology model as

much as it does for the biological evolution-of-the-species model. This is indeed strange

considering that its polar opposite—chaos arising from the destructive forces of

entropy—appears to be fundamental to our everyday life experience.  In other words,

things do seem to get naturally worse—more chaotic and disorganized (and hence

simpler)—unless individuals do something about them by imparting energy to the

systems they wish to improve or preserve (and thereby make more complex).

Well, why do we believe in this “scientific” myth of the evolution of complexity

from simplicity and its co-logical concomitants, mind from matter and life from the

nonliving?  Or is it just a prejudice that comes to Western mindsets inundated with

Newtonian and Darwinian philosophy?

Perhaps we can trace our “scientific” faith to our early ancestors who believed in

magic—they attempted to manipulate nature by any means they thought would work.

When some manipulation did finally work, perhaps the need to simplify and explain how

it works overcame the need to accept the mystical implications of how it works in the

hope that greater control of nature would result. Through such a “needy” theory, the

belief in a theoretical model—complexity emerges from simplicity—arose and

strengthened in scientific mindsets.  Hence, why believe in the spiritual realm or even

why accept its opposite tenet, simplicity emerges from complexity (hence, matter arises

from mind)?

 

A difficult question, but one that needs looking into.  First, though, consider just

how does any belief arise?  I think that a belief reflects a vision of hope (or despair) and

desire for change (or constancy)—possibly (and this is my own spin on this), a message

from a future waiting to be realized.  In quantum physics we deal with possible futures all

of the time.  These possibilities appear as abstract mathematical forms including vectors,

waves, and complex numbers, as seen from a perspective of the present moment.  Today,

even more than 100 years since the inception of quantum physics and its acceptance in

scientific reasoning (indeed forming the base of that reasoning), even though its

theoretical structures remain intact, debate still rages over what it means.  Consensus

indicates that whatever quantum physics means modern science cannot be useful or

predictive without these abstract (neo-Platonic) possibility-forms providing the ground of

all being of modern science.

 

Although many interpretations of quantum physics continue to circulate, several

posit the notion that both future and past events play a role in the construction of

everyday reality (I’ll mention only physicist John Cramer’s “Transactional

Interpretation” and Yakir Aharonov and Lev Vaidman’s “Time Symmetric Quantum

Formulism”). In my view (and possibly in theirs) all possible futures are in continual

contact with each and every present moment of conscious (and unconscious) awareness,

kind of like the way a piece of a hologram (made from the waves reflecting off all points

on an object) contains a whole picture of that object (see my book, Matter into Feeling).

Society as a whole behaves like the entire “temporal” hologram and hence

generates a universally clear (but average) belief which tends to head the society into a

specific (but also averaged out) future, while any individual in the society sees that belief

in a kind of fuzzy (yet more specific about certain details but much less about others) way

that rarely manifests as any individual wants.  The individual belief usually differs from

the mass belief in details, but the mass belief has the most power to move the society into

the future.  (Brain-washing results when no individual has a belief containing any

structure other than embedded in the slogan-like mass belief.)

 

Take the United States and its beliefs for example.  We each believe in “freedom”

in one way or another and hence tend to move into the future where freedom is

manifested.  Yet freedom can have many different individual meanings; anything from

freedom to defraud and commit violence to freedom to love who or what one wishes to

love.  Take our love affair with technology as another example.  We certainly will

continue to move into a more technologically advanced society as the decades roll on.

While many in the world see little use for this belief, the wave of the mass mind

overcomes them leaving in its wake the distraught and disenfranchised who resort to

often powerful means to halt the progression including holding up the banner of human

values above technology and the employ of terrorism or misinformation.

Most likely you don’t need convincing from a physicist as to how to run your own

life or what you should believe.  But let me persevere here.  We are all concerned with

good and evil.  Most of us feel that with an enlightened way of existing in the world all

evils would eventually disappear and all that would emerge would be a utopian world of

equality, freedom, pleasure, beauty, light, and so on.  Could such a world ever come into

being?

 

I’m going to answer in the negative here, perhaps surprisingly so since after all,

this article may be seen as a means to make the world a better place to live in through the

acceptance of a new tenet.  I’m going to suggest that in spite of the way the world may

seem, at times, to be hell-bent for disaster, it remarkably is a wonderful and magical

world at the same time.  I am not attempting to provide a Panglossian view of this old

globe.  Nor do I believe in a Pollyanna view that everything is just perfect the way it is,

but I will say that good and evil must coexist in order for a world of human values to

exist at all—in order that even consciousness has the ability to manifest as matter in the

first place.  (And in order that mind appear in its material guise as memory.)

In fact let me conclude by saying that if science has taught me anything, it has

certainly shown me how resilient and balanced the universe is.  Fluctuations continually

arise temporarily upsetting the balance, and just as quickly as they arise, forces come into

existence restoring that balance.  This axiom is true, seeming miraculously so, in all of

the factions comprising biological and physical science.  For examples, I’ll mention the

balancing forces of self-induction in electrical circuits that keep electromagnetic fields

from growing indefinitely and thereby unstable, the resistance of life to environmental

changes (thus maintaining the status quo with the arising of mutant strains from time to

time), and finally the mindful resistance we all offer when faced with new ideas including

these:  Consciousness is the ground of all being and things will get better for most of us,

but not all.

 

Fred Alan Wolf can be seen in the films Leap! and A Quantum Leap! at: http://store.avaiya.com/

 

Learn more about Fred Alan Wolf at:

mailto:fred@fredalanwolf.com

web page: http://www.fredalanwolf.com