The Empowering
Grace of Consciousness
Diarmuid O’Murchu
Gaston Saint Pierre (d. 2011) is a little known French Philosopher, who spent
much of his adult life in London pioneering the Metaphoric Technique, a form of
foot reflexology. Among his oft quoted
sayings, we find these words: “When I
change the level of my awareness I start attracting a different reality.”
It
is a more poetic version of an old scholastic dictum: action follows thought. Our contemporary Western culture is
addicted to practical outcomes requiring continuous action. And many of those
outcomes arise from rational discourse frequently neglecting other foundational dimensions, such as intuition,
imagination, consciousness, and spirituality.
What
Saint Pierre calls awareness, today we describe as consciousness, a major scientific exploration of our time, an
evolutionary imperative requiring urgent attention. Mainline science, following
people like Daniel Dennett claim that consciousness is merely a human quality
consisting of qualia (little physical units) bouncing off each other in our
brains. At the other end of the spectrum we encounter a growing body of
physicists for whom consciousness belongs primarily to the cosmic/planetary
creation, from which our human consciousness is derived. In other words, consciousness
is the primary stuff (foundational energy) from which all life – including our
humanity is derived.
As
suggested by Saint Pierre, consciousness, rather than action, should be our
primary concern. How we perceive, think, and feel is what dictates the quality
of our action. Moreover, when we prioritize consciousness, not merely will the
quality of our activity be different, we are likely to evoke practical outcomes
that will be more congruent with the evolutionary flow of life (we start
attracting a different reality).
The
logic of this argument takes on additional coherence when we embrace the
spiritual dimension. The foundational energy of creation is itself energized by
the Holy Spirit of God. Consciousness itself – as the great Carl Jung intimated
– is an endowment of God’s Spirit. It seems to be the primary stuff with which
God co-creates throughout the vast spectrum of creation.
This
religious conviction is frequently misunderstood, and often negatively
dismissed, by religionists. Why? Because spiritual understanding at stake is
stretched to new horizons that few if any of the major religions can embrace.
Here we are dealing with spirituality
rather than religion, and the former outdates the latter by many thousands of
years.
Today,
we are the beneficiaries of this newly expanded awakening, an empowering grace
of our time, sadly ignored or undermined by our Churches, but espoused and
embraced by a growing body of contemporary spiritual seekers.
For
further reading I recommend: Jude Currivan, The
Cosmic Hologram (2017); Paul Levy The
Quantum Revelation (2018), and Diarmuid O’Murchu, In the Beginning was the Spirit ((2012).
When
Particles Become Sparticles
A new particle accelerator, known as the Large
Hadron
Collider (LHC), opened at CERN, near Geneva,
Switzerland
on Sept. 10th, 2008. A massive underground tunnel, 27 km (17m) long,
and estimated to have cost
more than eight billion US dollars. In conditions as hot as the sun, and
with beams
of protons travelling at near the speed of light, scientists hope to
discover
new subatomic particles, many with sparkling new names. For more
extensive
information on the new collider, see Scientific
American, 298, 2 (February 2008).
With the development of the new particle accelerator, we note that a new scientific vocabulary is also coming to
birth. The name sparticle
is a merging of two words supersymmetric
and particle. In these new
experimental conditions, scientists hope to detect supercharged
sub-atomic
particles that are believed to have existed at less than a billionth of second
after the Big Bang. (Don’t try to make rational sense of that
or you’ll
drive yourself crazy). At this infinitesimal moment, electrons were selectrons,
quarks were squarks.
These ‘sister particles’ are
hugely unstable, and since they decay almost instantly, it will be a
case of
detecting their existence through indirect effect, rather than through
direct
observation.
What comes after the discovery of the Higgs Particle?
On 14 March 2013, the scientific community was in exuberant mood, as news media all over the world carried headlines of the nailing of the Higgs Boson at CERN. It was also deemed to be huge justification for the investment that had been made in the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) itself. Originally postulated by Scottish scientist, Peter Higgs, the particle helps to explain why some fundamental particles have mass when the symmetries controlling their interactions should require them to be massless, and—linked to this—why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force.
Thus physicists can now
validate the last untested area of the Standard Model's approach to
fundamental particles and forces, and feel more confident in their attempts to resolve other tantalizing questions such as the existence of dark matter.
What can
be achieved through the new collider is precisely the fruit of the interface of classical and quantum
science.
We have very accurate measurements and finely-tuned monitors to exert
maximum
control, but the possible outcomes defy all rationality and point us to
several
incomprehensible marvels of the universe to which we belong and the
planet that
we inhabit. Sparticles,
selectrons and squarks
are not just precise objects,
but more complex, wave-like dimensions of the energy-flow that
constitutes the
basic stuff from which everything is created. We can detect their
existence and
I suspect, as happened with the quarks and leptons, we will never nail
them
into an objective isolated identity. In other words, they don’t make
sense in
their individual separation. Relationship, and not separation, defines
the true
essence of all reality.
And this is where the euphoria around the Higgs particle may be misleading. Firstly, the so-called discovery relates to new traces detected in the debris of the collisions set up in the CERN collider, which physicists argue must be the Higgs. It is an assumption rather than a discovery. That it is actually the Higgs' boson has yet to be proved.
Secondly, establishing what gives particles mass feeds into the mechanistic understanding of life (and the universe) but contributes little to the more quantum understanding of reality which is much more about the wave and flow of the creative vacuum. Over 90% of the atom - and of subatomic particles - is empty space. Surely the critical questions of understanding belong to making sense of the 90% emptiness rather than the less-than 10% mass! Might it be that the "discovery" of the Higgs is an actual distraction from the search for deeper scientific truth? And of course it begs other questions, particularly: what is driving the search today?
Power and Money
Science is heavily wedded to objective control of
the data,
and there is a daily demand for scientists to develop outcomes that will
help
us to control the waywardness of the world we inhabit: disease,
violence,
poverty, ignorance, etc. But we are not controlling them; we are failing
dismally in doing so, yet the scientists apparently cannot acknowledge
the
dismal failure rates of the scientific dream.
Which brings me to the second major factor, money!
Science
is driven by money, and will tend to favor research and outcomes that
attract
the highest bidders. Sources of funding will support a project like LHC
because
in the long-term it hopes it will empower the world of science to gain
greater
control over the destiny of mankind and the planet. In other words,
those who
provide the money have little time for the spiritual and even the
cultural
implications of what is transpiring in the larger arena of contemporary
scientific research.
At one level, the psychic battle between control and trust is as old as humanity
itself. One hopes that as access to
information becomes more widespread and diffuse, and as more
rank-and-file
humans trust their intuition and alternative ways of understanding, we
might
see the imperial wisdom become more humble and spiritually embracing.
The
rigor of science won’t suffer because of this; paradoxically, I
suspect,
science will acquire a new power – a richer and more empowering
synthesis
arising from the integration of the rational and the spiritual, the
measurable
and the mystical. In that new landscape, trust and not control will have
the
final word.
References:
Wallace, Alan B. (2007), Hidden
Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness,
Scientific
American,
February 2008.
Web
Pages:
www.lhc.ac.uk;
http://lhc.web.Cern.ch/lhc;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sparticle.