The Higgs Boson, which is the particle associated with the Higgs Field that is said to give “mass to matter” by means of its gluey properties, has been “discovered” at last.

Much flowing of champers at CERN, near Geneva, and torrents of geeky boffins bouncing all over our screens with silly grins on their faces. No wonder, their grants are secure for another 20 years or so as they try to work out what we are going to do with a little dot on a graph called Higgs.

But what if it’s not all that it seems?

Consider the nature of our world: a vast unified field we know as the universe, in which everything is connected to everything else. That much is agreed by almost everyone.

The field is characterised by a vast emptiness — if we ignore the elusive “dark matter” and “dark energy” presupposed by scientists to fill in the gaps. The scientific mind abhors a vacuum.

That there is no sign of this stuff is par for the course. The same happened with the Higgs, which astoundingly appeared from nowhere, at the very last minute, “exactly where Peter Higgs said it would be”. A religious miracle for our times.

What is happening here is that theories are being accepted for the truth, albeit unconsciously, and the highly imaginative human mind is creating epiphenomena to bring the idea down to earth.

Remember the double helix of Francis Crick? I was once told by a scientist who knew him that he was fond of taking LSD, the drug of choice for producing epiphenomena.

An epiphenomenon is a secondary effect or by-product which arises from, but which does not causally influence a process.

It’s the way human minds fill in the gaps of our knowledge to make sense of the world. Look around and you will spot thousands of them, many as fanciful as you can get. That chap in the sky with a white beard passes for God more often that we’d care to admit.

The problem for science is that it’s stuck with a particulate, granular idea of what constitutes reality. So a particle creates a field which “gives mass to matter”. Mathematics says so!

But maths is just a language to describe epiphenomena. If the phenomenon is factually wrong, so is the mathematics. Scientists are playing silly games with nature, which is beyond the reach of any machine ever invented.

The alternative explanation goes right to the heart of reality. Mysticism eschews vast colliders, banks of computers, and a search for ever-smaller granules to explain what they think they are seeing.

The mystical view is based on a simple apprehension of the cosmos as a “unity of Being”.

At first glance it’s not very different from science: Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, for example, demonstrates that “everything in the universe is connected to everything else”. Pauli was clearly aware of Indra’s Net, a very ancient version of the same principle.

The difference is that Quantum science does not accept the full implications of Indra’s Net, that it is just a human picture to make sense of the apparently lumpy nature of the world. Whereas “everything is connected” means that everything derives from the same “substance”: Consciousness, or to give it its earlier title, Spirit.

This is the view of the Rig Veda and of the Upanishads of ancient India, and all mystical literature ever since. It is confirmed by mystical and spiritual experiences described many times on this site.

Does it matter? Why shouldn’t we just play around with this playful universe like dolphins in a vast sea?

Because people are not like porpoises. In our latest incarnation we are essentially killing machines, with massive inferiority complexes, prone to waging evermore destructive wars. Science itself is responsible for all of the non-natural human slaughters in history.

Over a few centuries, national disputes have gone from knightly jousting and bows and arrows to the concept of mutually-assured destruction with nuclear bombs designed to kill tens of millions and poison the land, sea and air for a hundred years.

That’s the result of the principal delusion of science: that it is possible to have deadly enemies and eliminate them. One Adolf Hitler can virtually destroy a continent.

The mystical Unity of Being shows that to kill others is to kill part of oneself. Science’s particulate model slices up reality and sets one against another. It is a false dichotomy.

At the deepest level of understanding there is only one all-encompassing Being. Let’s call it God.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

A Mystic in the Modern World is coming soon.

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CERN* is alive with the sound of Quantum physicists.

While it doesn’t quite have the ring of the opening line of The Sound of Music, the place really is abuzz these days with pinging particles singing from the same hymn sheet.

The reason for it all is a minor “breakthrough” in the seemingly age-old quest for that most elusive of objects: the Higgs Boson, also called the God Particle.

“The Higgs,” as it is universally known — after British scientist, Peter Higgs — is thought to be a kind of field which matter, in its disassembled quantum state, passes through. The drag on particles by the field gives mass — or the appearance of mass — to the bits that are said to constitute matter.

You may think the above paragraph is filled with enough caveats to drag any particle down, but that is how the experts themselves tell it. Though even they can’t really believe they will achieve this crucial step towards verifying the Standard Model of the Universe as imagined (theoretically) during the age of Albert Einstein.

The Higgs is now thought to occupy a narrow segment of the giga-electron volt spectrum defined as 125 GeV. All else has been more or less checked and eliminated. It’s a bit like a gambler with one throw of the dice left to secure his winnings — all or nothing.

Psychologically, some of the players are preparing to be disappointed, saying: “If the Higgs is not found, it will be even more exciting!” Yeah, right.

But you’ve got to hand it to them for their energy and enthusiasm, not to mention their zeal for spending copious quantities of our money. Quantum expenditure is something they have yet to master. Let us hope it is less elusive than the Higgs.

In his Royal Institution lecture on Quantum Mechanics over the Christmas holidays, Prof Brian Cox claimed that Pauli’s Exclusion Principle demonstrates that “everything in the universe is connected to everything else” — the mystics’ Unity of Being, perhaps?

He then rubbed a very large uncut diamond, thus “increasing the energy level of all the electrons within it”. At that moment every other electron in the universe apparently adjusted its energy level because it can’t occupy the same level as any other, according to Pauli.

Think about it: all movements on Earth, or anywhere else, “cause” a maelstrom of frantic activity around the universe. Could the universe actually be alive, as genuine mystics have always asserted? It sounds very much like Indra’s Net to me — a very ancient idea that everything in the universe reflects everything else.

Did those early physicists get their ideas from ancient mysticism (“hippy stuff,” according to Brian Cox)? Discuss.

Similarly, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, much used by Cox in his lecture, has the unmistakable whiff of free will in action. Again though, it’s spoken of as a driver of events, not the result of intelligent action.

With the Higgs all the rage right now, it’s not easy to squeeze in an alternative view of the universe. But as this column is Midweek Mysticism, an attempt must be made to inject some sanity into the “will we, won’t we” debate that’s boiling over in Geneva.

Last week I chanced upon hints of a fascinating book published in 1901 by Dr Richard Maurice Bucke, a 19th-century psychologist and medical doctor: Cosmic Consciousness — A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind.

Twenty-nine years earlier, Bucke had experienced a shattering and life-changing expansion of consciousness in which he “saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter, but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is also built and ordered. That without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run absolutely certain.”

The content and breathless nature of that statement bears all the hallmarks of countless mystical experiences down the ages.

Dr Bucke believed there are three stages in the psycho-spiritual development of man: Simple Consciousness, which is shared with animals; Self Consciousness, which is the normal state of human beings; and Cosmic Consciousness, which only the illumined attain.

He cites nine examples of such beings: the Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Dante, the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and, interestingly, the American poet Walt Whitman, whom he knew personally. There would also be many unknown people with such insights not made public.

He suggests that they are the beginnings of a new race of man increasingly inhabiting the Earth. The marks of this race are: “moral and intellectual elevation”, a clear conception of the meaning of the universe, a good character, and having passed the “age of illumination”.

In time, all humans will possess this faculty, he writes. “The same race and not the same; for a Cosmic Conscious race will not be the race that exists today … The simple truth is, that there has lived on [Earth] appearing at intervals for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another [superior] race … breathing the same air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing. … This new race is in the act of of being born from us …”

As an antidote to the Higgs/CERN excitement, I recommend this book to you. I spent a while last week trying to lay my hands on a copy. Amazon didn’t have any, although they acknowledged its existence. Library stacks have long ago pulped it to make room for rows of computers and shelves of DVDs.

As is often the case, though, serendipity, in the form of the “Library Angel” came to the rescue. It’s obtainable from the Kindle system.

What would we researchers of arcana do without Amazon’s Kindle? Downloaded in seconds for a pittance, there it is, fully formed like Hydra, a voice of sanity from the past.

It’s just a pity that the file is not editable. It would be great if out-of-copyright books at least, had a cut and paste facility from Kindle to Word. It would be easy enough on Kindle for PC, a free online app.

Never mind, many thanks for not so small mercies.

* CERN in Geneva, home of the Large Hadron Collider and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

John Evans

… who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Mystics in the Modern World is coming soon.

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Is there a quota system for the number of “Big Beasts” a political party can have? Another EU directive, perhaps?

I ask because ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie wrote the following in Saturday’s Daily Mail: “A few big Labour beasts including Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander and defence spokesman Jim Murphy are quietly muttering in the corner …”.

Do Big Beasts mutter in corners? And quietly?

Douglas Alexander, “wee Dougie”, is a personable fellow who made a rather good joke in the Libyan debate, although I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.

Jim Murphy talks very quietly on aspects of defence, but I’m not sure I recall any details.

Nowadays, parties are defined by their Big Beasts and their roars. Ed Balls certainly roars, and is very beastly, but “Big Ed”?

Don’t you get the impression that Labour is the Incredible Shrinking Party?

Poppycock Watch
So CERN has captured antimatter — antihydrogen atoms, to be precise — for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. What are the implications of this for the rest of us?

For science it’s a chance to reconstruct the beginnings of the universe. Isn’t it always?

What though if the universe didn’t have a beginning? Is it inconceivable to the boffin bonce that not everything has to start somewhen?

It’s interesting to the mystic mind because it gives physical validation to one of its profoundest tenets: that matter is really “mind” or rather, consciousness.

Consider, if every particle in the universe has an antiparticle which destroys both on contact, and therefore the sum total is Zero, ie, the universe only exists physically as a state of tension between equal but opposite and, crucially, separate electrical charges, an overview of all of it would reveal nothing but emptiness. A void, in fact.

Once again, scientists reduce everything to nothingness, but miss one important element: Intelligence. The aliveness of space, in its general and particular senses, completely eludes them.

At its heart, the universe is made up of consciousness alone, or what used to be called Spirit. That is the mystic’s view. It actually explains everything so much better than science does, because consciousness/spirit displays “intelligence,” something science claims as its own yet denies to the void that is the universe.

The problem has always been that consciousness/spirit is so close to us, all-pervading in fact, that it’s possible to stumble through life without ever knowing it exists. It’s easy to view life as just a barrage of thoughts.

Look at existence through a telescope and spirit/consciousness is invisible. View life through a spiritual lens, by creating a silent space within, and all becomes clear.

And when you see it, everything makes sense. Scientists appear as primitive creatures, rattling around and making a lot of noise in a universe beyond their understanding.

Mystics try not to laugh. They are basically compassionate people. They would not be mystics if they didn’t have all-embracing temperaments.

But sometimes it’s very hard not to.

I spend a lot of my time tracking one of the great tragedies/farces of our age. I refer, of course, to the fate of the euro.

I’m not sure why, especially since Great Britain — as we should now get used to calling our homeland — avoided it by the skin its teeth. The “great and the good,” as is usual, unerringly chose the wrong option, loudly proclaiming that staying out would be disastrous. Tut, tut.

There is a fascination in observing a slow-motion system wreckage in real time. Most economists — not the most accurate of prophets — now fall on the side of pessimism about this wonky, schizoid currency group.

The psychology of the process is even more interesting than watching the gradually disintegrating Heath-Robinson contraption.

Politicians are in an enormous quandary, damned if they do, and obliterated if they don’t. Eurocrats are chasing what tails they have left after the kicking they’ve taken by the forces of history. The astonishing part is that most of them have yet to budge from their pre-set positions. It’s as if they are frozen in a prehistoric landscape unable to summon the will to awaken.

Most interesting is observing those few who do come round from the Brussels Trance and either slink away into obscurity, or shrug a pair of pragmatic shoulders and carry on as if nothing had happened.

The pachyderm in the tool shed though is the European Central Bank (ECB) which is so stuffed with almost worthless Greek and peripheral countries’ debt that it is effectively bankrupt. It daren’t let Greece default because its balance sheet would collapse.

Prognosis? Some species of disaster, ranging from a devastating bust up, to total collapse of the system, leading to another calamitous global financial crash.

China might then emerge as the dominant power in the world, and we will dance to a Communist tune. The Marxist-Leninists will have won after all.

Britain might at least break away from this self-inflicted tragedy by calling the promised in-out referendum on the EU.

It would, at minimum, show a direction of travel that is inevitable at some point.

Book of the Week
The travails of many big political projects remind me of one of my favourite books:

Back in the 1970s Shunryu Suzuki (not to be confused with D.T. Suzuki), was then Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. He wrote a classic of Zen and world literature called Zen Mind, Beginners’ Mind.

The theme of the book was that “experts” have closed minds with few possibilities, while “beginners” have open minds with many possibilities. Therefore it’s better to be a beginner than an expert.

It’s a wonderful book, full of wisdom and terrific writing. But is it true? In our society, experts are the ones who make the money. And money is the measure of success or failure. Beginners: students, interns, rookies, greenhorns, apprentices, newbies … are the ones we pass over in silence, and often without pay.

What Suzuki was really getting at is that beginners view everything as if it were new, fresh, and deeply interesting. Their minds are focused ferociously on the matter in hand, like a child with a new toy. They get more out of every experience because they are fully present to it — the essence of Zen.

Experts, by contrast, take a rather jaded, “seen it all before” view of the same events. Their minds are turning to “more important” matters like their diary for the coming week, upcoming meetings, papers to be written and presented, dinner parties to attend, boards to chair …

Suzuki felt that “attention” is the most important aspect of any person’s life. Attend fully to the matter in hand and you are fully alive. Split your mind by putting some things on autopilot and you’re not present to the moment, so partially dead. Marriages often suffer from this tendency and don’t last long once the robot takes over.

I’ve read Suzuki’s book a number of times in the past few years and I’m always amazed at the influence his simple message continues to have at the highest levels, especially among experts.

Steve Jobs, legendary founder of Apple, advises: “Stay hungry, stay foolish”.

Thought of the Week
Plan A supposes a Plan B. A plan is just a plan, but an A without a B is superfluous and misleading. If George Osborne is set on only one plan for the economy, he should say, “There is no Plan A, just The Plan.”

Any philosopher worth his hemlock will tell you that.

John Evans

Who is the author of The Eternal Quest for Immortality: Is it staring you in the face? Available from Amazon and all good booksellers.

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Back in March the BBC’s science strand, Horizon took a cranky look at the Big Bang theory which states that the universe came into being from nothing, courtesy of a massive explosion.

The subtitle was: Everything you thought you knew about the universe could be wrong. I reviewed the film here:

Saturday Ramble: Big Bangs are not what they used to be.

Although the many discrepancies in the theory were well aired, most of the cosmologists featured defended Big Bang, with a few reservations.

This week, the programme revisited the theme and discovered that the game has changed. Almost every scientist interviewed, or polled, no longer believes in the Big Bang. Continuous Creation is the nearest they come to a consensus on the issue. Victories for Fred Hoyle and mysticism then.

As usual Horizon provided us with many richly comic moments in its attempts to depict the ideas of the scientists, who were mainly gathered at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. It included Stephen Hawking, who was not interviewed.

There was a deep-voiced Russian who had a theory involving Swiss Cheese — it’s in the “baubles” apparently. He was shown on a seashore with a magnificent camera photographing honeycombed rocks, presumably because they vaguely resembled Swiss Cheese. I cast him as a KGB agent in the BBC’s spy series, Spooks.

All the interviewees were shown playing with a fiendishly complex version of the Rubik Cube, no doubt to demonstrate the brilliance of their minds, while others scrawled indecipherable symbols and endless equations on giant blackboards.

There were other stereotypes too. A young Indian, Param Singh, a useful cricketer, of course, is shown smashing the ball into the ground in great style. The shot is repeated a number of times to illustrate his theory: the Big Bounce.

As he explained that the universe at first expands, then runs out of energy, then contracts back to nothing before rebounding into another expansionary phase, I could hear the ancient Hindu Creation myth: Brahman (God) breathes out and the cosmos comes into being. Brahman inhales and the universe disappears. Brahman breathes out …

You can take an Indian out of India, but you can’t take India out of the Indian.

A Japanese mathematician, Professor Michio Kaku, who hangs out a lot on BBC 4, appeared in a vast cathedral-like dome built by NASA to create and study … Nothing. The idea was to suck all the air and dust out of it over a two-day period. What’s left is “nothing”. Or so they thought.

The moment he spoke I knew it was nonsense. There would still be space left, dimension, the shape of the dome. Kaku knew this too; he had been brought up as a Buddhist so was quite comfortable with the notion that “nothing” is in fact “something”. But NASA apparently was not and wasted millions of dollars on a dumb experiment.

Kaku made the distinction between “the absence of matter” and the theoretical notion of nothingness. Pure energy sometimes turns itself into matter and back again, suggesting that even matter is illusory, as the mystics have always known. Where does that leave Higgs Boson (the God Particle) and the great Collider built to find it?

Questions, questions. But even that dome pales into insignificance against the stuff they are doing down in Louisiana. There, a team of scientists have constructed a brick igloo three miles long. It contains tubes designed to detect Gravity Waves which might contain information about the Big Bang — assuming it ever happened. The lead scientist explained that it could detect differences in the length of the tubes of a fraction of the width of an atom’s nucleus. Impressive?

We were treated to a demo just for the cameras. Wouldn’t you know, the graph suddenly spiked, almost off the page. Gravity Wave? Hooray!

But the Eureka died in our throats. It was a freight train passing five miles away. The boss grinned with embarrassment. It seems the equipment is so sensitive it’s affected by every movement on the planet. Would that include a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rain forest? Apparently so.

Bernard Hill, the deadpan narrator intoned: “This technology is still at a very early stage in its development.”

And all that money spent on it too. It’s a good job there’s plenty of it around.

By the time a Professor Smolin (phonetic) started talking about Darwinian universes spawning child universes according to the “law” of natural selection, a visit to the pub was long overdue. However, your scribe stuck to his doleful task with a heavy sinking feeling in every part of his body.

A chap with an English accent, called Neil Turok, told us that time just sprang into existence along with 10 spacial dimensions and a “multiverse” of 10 universes. One of these spawned our own. What we see in the night sky is only a tiny fraction of what there is “out there.” He couldn’t explain what time actually is though, and confessed, “We must do a lot better than this.” At last we are agreed on something — or would that be nothing?

Now to Oxford’s finest, Professor Sir Roger Penrose, no less, left till last as top of the bill. His reputation is so starry he could be a Darwinian universe all on his own.

There’s always a but, isn’t there. Like Freud late in life, he awoke one morning to the realisation that his life’s work was wrong. The Big Bang was a gonner. That awkward Yorkshireman Hoyle was probably right all along. Continuous creation is the only solution. Like Freud he set about doing it all over again.

How did he feel about this? “Exhilaration,” he said. “I’ve now got something new to think about!” You’ve got to admire the old boy’s pluck.

For as long as I can remember, the BBC has been pushing a line on science that would brook no opposition. From Peter Scott in the 1950s to David Attenborough today, the universe began with a Big Bang from nothing, and life was created by Darwinian natural selection. No other agency was involved. God is a dodo.

But it’s the Beeb that’s the dodo now. The 21st century is burying Big Bang and soon it will be Darwin’s turn to go. When NASA confuses space with nothing, it’s time to bring in the Zen masters.

John Evans

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Just a few weeks ago the world was wondering if we were about to be pitched into a deadly Black Hole created by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Relax. The machine has broken down and will not be cranked up again until the spring.

Strange then that another Black Abyss stretches before us today in the shape of a virulent debt deflation of almost unimaginable ferocity.

Take these words by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’s UK Telegraph:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.

In case you think that smacks of hysteria, this is a man who has called this crisis correctly ever since the late summer of 2007. He adds:

“During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. … Central bankers still paralysed by a misplaced fear of inflation – whether in Europe, Britain, or the US – have become a public menace and should be held to severe account by our democracies. The imminent and massive danger is now self-feeding debt deflation.”

What this crisis shows is that world prosperity was built on a giant illusion: that there was real value in other people’s promises to pay at some future date, and that you could pass the parcel at a vast profit.

Time has run out and a bubble the size of an asteroid has landed and exploded in the centre of our civilization — the banking system.

The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett agrees, “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful.”

Evans-Pritchard is lacerating about the EU and its Central Bank. It offered no “cover” to the Fed when Ben Bernanke slashed rates to 2 percent. The ECB simply raised its rate to 4.25 percent into a steep downturn, making oil inflation even worse.

As a last resort, it seems, the American authorities will use Bernanke’s famous printing press “to expand the menu of assets that it buys.” In the worst case, that could lead to a massive run on the dollar by foreign creditors and no end of misery for us all. But it may be necessary nonetheless.

At home, I have absolutely no confidence in the British government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They have been woefully slow to act, their policy to hide their heads under a pillow hoping it will all go away.

If Brown had even a small slice of a leader’s courage he would put together a massive package to recapitalize the British banking system; disown the “mark-to-market” accounting agreement, which forces banks into insolvency by estimating their assets on depressed valuations; take immediate control of interest rates by reducing them to 2 percent; begin to prepare for withdrawal from the useless European Union; and work closely with the Americans, who are, at the very least, fully aware of the immense dangers we face.

The Kraken is awake and bearing down on us fast. Over coming months and years we may wish that the Hadron Collider had swallowed us all up when it had the chance.

Update: The British Government has announced a variety of measures to recapitalize the banks and get the inter-bank lending markets working again. It amounts to a $900 billion bailout, eerily identical to the Paulson Plan for a country five times the size of Britain.

John Evans

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