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When we ask deep questions, at
first it seems that the answers can be found by digging, by extending
our usual explorations to greater depth. However, when we
persist, we always find something totally unexpected, and qualitatively
different. And then we realize that the “totally
other” forms the
basis for the world we thought we knew. This is the greatest
surprise. And in this way, we realize that our everyday view of
the world and of ourselves was never more than a summary picture,
convenient for getting around in our daily life, but only a story,
worse than inaccurate, in fact totally wrong in its essence.
When we asked about the structure of the universe, it became clear,
first, that neither the Earth nor the Sun are in the center of the
Universe. For a few hundred years our understanding of our
Universe offered a picture that grew ever vaster in space and
time. But then we began to understand that our Universe had
originated in a Big Bang, in the tiniest of beginnings, possibly at the
origin of time itself. We can now trace the initial footprint of
our own galaxy back to a space smaller than that of an atom.
When we asked about the structure of matter, we found all matter to be
made out of atoms, which in turn are made up out of just a few
particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. All properties of
different materials are caused not by differences in substance, but
rather differences in configurations of the same building blocks.
And what is more, these building blocks behave and are related to each
other in a totally different way than physicists expected at
first. Quantum mechanics tells us that there is only one electron
field, in which each individual electron appears as a different wave in
the same ocean.
When we asked about the structure
of life, we found all forms of life that we have ever met to be
related, stemming from a shared origin. The huge diversity we see
around us shields for our eyes the commonality of the basic structure
and mechanism of operation of each living cell. Every detail of
our skeleton and organs and anything that makes up our body has been
sculpted and refined in a slow planet-wide experiment of testing for
efficiency, a process that has stretched out over hundreds of millions
of years.
When we asked about the structure of our mind, it became clear that we
are only aware of a small sliver of what makes us tick, and that there
is a vast amount of unconscious processing that results in what little
it is that we are consciously aware of. Just as the blueprint of
our bodies has been refined over the ages, so has our mind been shaped
in a slow process of adaptation and innovation. Who we think we
are and what we think the world is, does not so much reflect reality as
it reflects the complex processes of natural selection.
This is, in a nutshell, the magnificent story that science has told us,
so far. The furthest galaxies share a subatomic origin. All
subatomic particles share a single field that spans the universe.
All forms of life known to us share a single ancestor. And all
these insights now take shape in a mind not designed for insight but
bred for survival.
This last point implies that we have no guarantee at all that our
insights reflect the nature of reality. In fact, many
contemplatives in vastly different times and cultures have told us
something similar: that even our most refined insights are part of a
far-flung story, produced by but not reflecting reality.
It is my guess that the scientific journey will continue to yield even
deeper surprises. After showing us the intrinsic relatedness of
the way in which space, time, matter, life and mind appear, I expect
science to throw light on the nature of appearance itself. If
such a revolution were to happen, it would go deeper than the
Copernican or Darwinian revolutions, or anything science has found so
far, and the implications would be wider and even more shocking.
Just as technologies, such as metallurgy and alchemy, have foreshadowed
aspects of later scientific insights, so I presume contemplative
traditions to foreshadow aspects of scientific insights that are yet to
be discovered. And while we cannot know in detail which parts
will turn out to have played this role, we can safely predict that
those parts have nothing to do with particular cultural habits and
trappings in terms of rituals and rules. The best way I can think
of for catching a glimpse of a future science is to sift through past
contemplative traditions to find those rare gems of insight that are
most tradition-independent.
Piet, 7/31/06.