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Saturday Ramble: Cosmology and a gold lion

Posted in Cosmology, Mysticism, Science on October 10th, 2011

Gold Lion The BBC has broadcast an update to its Horizon programme: Everything we thought we knew about the universe may be wrong. Our review of the original show is here.

The new take incorporates much of the old footage with an enhanced script and a much more sceptical slant. Alas, a lot of the risible special effects are still there: the dark, derelict warehouse, the big red balloon inflating and deflating, and the black tarlike sludge representing Dark Energy.

Things have changed though between the first episode and the second. It was not only Syntagma that cast doubt on the “isn’t science wonderful?” orgy of self-congratulation. This time we actually have a cosmologist saying that the whole Standard Model of the universe could be completely wrong: “Why don’t we just take it at face value,” he says.

I suspect too many hefty grants are at risk from following that path.

Another participant actually admits that “Nothing is really Something,” one of my main points about the original programme, quoting a T’ang Dynasty Zen master, Huang Po: “Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the [Universal Consciousness].”

The English author Paul Brunton expressed this paradox, or reverse perspective thus, “What the unenlightened regard as substance, that is, the form of things, is really its negation, whereas true substance, that is the essence out of which those forms emerge, is disregarded by them as non-existent. The hardest barricade for our western understanding to break through is this simple acceptance of the Unmanifest as ultimate reality.”

More recent scientific work also takes a few potshots at the cosmologists. In a study carried out by Durham University, physicists contend that the accepted theory is deeply flawed, which could mean the universe is not expanding as rapidly as believed and there is no “dark side” after all. In other words, Dark Matter and Dark Energy do not exist. Since they are invisible to all science’s instruments — only gobbledegook maths can “see” them — this was obvious from the start as I’ve repeatedly written on this site and elsewhere.

Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society, publisher of the findings, said: “This would challenge greatly our assumptions about the long-term future of the universe, because the assumption at the moment is that the universe is expanding and if it isn’t that would be a huge shock.”

This means that the whole of cosmology is a mess. The impenetrable mathematical formulae are as meaningless as a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, entertaining but empty.

The study is based on new data from a NASA satellite put into orbit in 2001 to monitor big bang heat radiation.

So, what is the universe really like? We can only use analogy to paint the picture. The best one I know was developed by Fa Tsang, a patriarch of the Flower Garland philosophy, Hua Yen: The Gold Lion.

Its subject is the relationship between existence and consciousness. The gold from which the lion is crafted represents the universal substance, consciousness, while the lion stands for form.

Gold has no inherent nature but has taken on the form of a lion because of the work of an artist. The lion is not substantial, being made entirely from gold. Reality lies with the gold, although the lion appears to be real.

The lion only exists because of the gold; remove the gold and there would be nothing left. Thus the lion, having been “born” is also subject to death. The gold cannot be changed and is not subject to death.

In the unitary Flower Garland view, when an enlightened being views the lion (the world) he sees the manifest universe in which all things are distinct, each reflecting each other, and in which everything is made of gold (consciousness).

Fa Tsang then delineates the mysteries surrounding the appearances of the golden lion:

* Gold and lion exist simultaneously in perfect sufficiency.
* Though lion and gold are merged in each other, neither hinders the other from being what it is: gold and lion.
* To see the lion is to see lion and not gold. To see the gold is to see gold and not the lion. Sometimes both are visible and at other times neither.
* When seeing the lion in its totality, the eye itself becomes the whole lion. The same is true of all the senses, each possesses the whole lion exclusively as well as jointly.

As a description of the universe it is far closer to the truth than the clunky, even absurd, Standard Model, which uses complexity and a made-up language — “advanced” mathematics — to obscure and hence to deceive.

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.

Muscular Mysticism is coming soon.

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Midweek Mysticism: The march of the clever clogs

Posted in Cosmology, Mysticism, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Science, Spirituality on July 5th, 2011

Smart Alec I’ve read my fair share of articles in the philosophical press, as well as their scientific, psychological and political equivalents.

As a result, I’ve long come to the conclusion that modern philosophy exists solely to demonstrate how clever philosophers are — or think they are. French “sages” are notorious for this tendency, but the Brits and Americans are not far behind.

One of the commonest ploys is to represent a point of view by quoting the name of a long deceased philosopher: Kant, Spinoza, Wittgenstein et al. If you had previously read the entire corpus of their work, you will know what the writer is getting at. If not, hard cheese. You’re not as clever as the writer, obviously.

This is what might be called “shorthand jargon”, a method of eliminating anyone who’s not in the club, the “throw the rascal out” tendency. It’s rife throughout the academic journal scene — the way experts communicate with each other. This is true of science and many other narrower disciplines.

I think philosophy is the worst though, because it has developed an acute sense of inferiority. The grand old art of thinking in abstractions has been steadily whittled away by the advance of science, the massively funded language of our times. Moreover, mathematics is taking over from elegant set-piece argumentation over sylph-like points of disputation.

It’s not an idle thought that if you can’t express your most complex ideas, or convictions, so that any intelligent person can understand them, they are probably not true, and if you need mathematics to express anything, it is not of this world. Happily, mysticism is the simplest of all the grand philosophies.

Most big-picture science is tenuous. It hangs on a gallery of dubious theories and yet is presented by big-science communicators as the finished article. If you object, you’ll get a load of brain-busting jargon in return, couched in a withering scorn, the most supercilious of which is: You haven’t done the mathematics!

By the way, this is also true of Left-wing ideologies. If you take issue with them, you’re a fascist Tory toad — never mind that Fascism arose on the political Left (see Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism). It is a potent form of fascism in itself.

So, modern politics, modern philosophy, modern science and modern society have one element in common. They employ complexity and monocultural certainty to eliminate opposition and alternative viewpoints. The truth is being deliberately obscured by runaway egotism.

Where then does mysticism come into this? It existed before formal science as Idealism, the conviction that everything is made by consciousness, or Spirit. Most philosophers down the ages have been Idealists in one form or another. It can be simply expressed by the latest political buzz phrase: “We’re all in this together!”

Dualism, on the other hand, creates a sense of Us and Them, a central crutch of most academic disciplines. Theology and practical religion are not immune either. It is also the cause of war.

If scientists dismiss “woolly mysticism” out of hand, they are rejecting most of the predecessors in their own subject area.

True mysticism, being essentially an experiential mode, uses the classic tools of science in a private quest: personal experimentation, data collection and interpretation. It is individualism unbound, with the proviso that anyone can participate — if they dare.

It begins with the mystic and the mind and ends with a transformation. Once you have had one of the great experiences, you change irreversibly. Doubt disappears, except for the scepticism of an audience that did not share your moment of truth.

My conviction is that the 21st century will slowly introduce a new era of philosophical and practical mysticism. The younger generation has been brought up on the mental wizardry of Harry Potter. The seed has been sown.

We do need to overturn the 20th-century’s totalitarian approach to understanding.

John Evans

John Evans 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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Saturday Ramble: Peak experience is losing your mind

Posted in Cosmology, Immortality, Mysticism, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, Quantum Physics, Religion, Science on April 4th, 2011

Kevin Pietersen winning the Ashes for England

Syntagma is getting so much feedback on our recent set of articles on science and mysticism that I’m compelled to continue with the series. Apologies to readers who are not tuned in. Links can be found in the footer to this piece.

On Radio 4′s Start the Week this morning, neurologist David Eagleman described how our “conscious mind” knows nothing of what is happening in the “brain” where our lives are plotted out in detail well in advance of our knowing about it and acting on it. We are nothing but puppets on a string.

That basic template might be true as far as it goes, see here: Do we have freewill and where is it?, except that the process takes place outside the physical brain, which may be just a translation device, an interface, into the body. Scientists should not take everything at face value, something quantum mechanics should have taught them by now.

In my forthcoming book, Muscular Mysticism, the theme is developed beyond the stage of “seeing into the nature of reality”, the centrepiece of the first volume*. It covers the ground of the genuine mystic as a scientist of immateriality, by which I mean the materially unknowable: the cloud of unknowing.

“Muscular” because it centres on a relentless pursuit of firsthand knowledge, a single-minded drive for the perfection of experiential knowing that can’t be mistaken for the truth because it is the truth.

A motor racing driver is a good analogy. He risks life and bones to arrive at a state where every bodily response to unpredictable circumstances is controlled by apparently automatic impulses. Indeed, to “think” about anything at all would spell disaster. Daydreaming or calculation would mean death at this level of performance. It could almost be described as a form of meditation.

The reward is a sustained sense of elation, as consciousness seems to split from normal mind patterns and the inhibitions of daily existence. Total immersion in this state releases an experience close to spiritual exaltation, as slow, clunky thought processes give way before the unity of body and soul.

Many of us have experienced moments of peak experience when playing sports. Suddenly everything seems to go right: balls hit the right side of the line in tennis time and again, or the back of the net in football; there’s a surge of ecstatic energy in running or rugby; we’re suddenly stroking the ball to the boundary in cricket. For a while we can do nothing wrong. Our opponents watch in dismay. It doesn’t last, but we sure as hell remember it.

A mystic would observe that the “normal” mind is nowhere to be found during peak periods. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow has written extensively on these experiences; for a broad coverage of the field, see Colin Wilson’s New Pathways in Psychology.

These are just the foothills of dedicated mystical experience, but it illustrates the splitting off, and falling away, of normality required for full-blown experience of the ineffable. Paradoxically, this turns out to be more real than life itself.

Muscular mysticism explores the fundamental workings of what lies beneath the material world through experience, not an electron microscope.

Physics always struggles to separate the scientist from the object under observation, straining for objectivity. Contrarily, the mystic plunges into the object area, observing it from within. Both quantum mechanics and mysticism demonstrate that objectivity is a deception by the egoic mind.

You won’t learn how to swim without jumping into water. Textbooks and all the mathematical demonstrations in the world won’t crack it. Experience of the actuality is essential.

Mysticism is not incompatible with science, as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and, in recent times, others such as Fritjof Capra have shown. It represents the essence of who we are, from which we arise, and whence we return.

We need both to give us anything like a complete picture of the world, as all the spiritual texts ever written firmly attest.

Muscular Mysticism is coming soon.

* John Evans 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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Saturday Ramble: The Big Bang is a limp whimper

Posted in Big Bang, CERN, Cosmology, Science, Stephen Hawking, Zen on October 15th, 2010

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

Posted in Cosmology, Dark Matter, Horizon, Politics, Science on March 13th, 2010

Big Bang There was a time when I believed that the great and the good — top politicians, scientists, writers, etcetera — were better and cleverer than I am. That might still hold true, but I no longer believe it. Piece by piece the edifice of admiration has crumbled until only the memory of it remains.

Almost every profession and calling has lost its air of invincibility in the past two decades. Growing up is a factor, of course, but attacks on elites by the media are a force to be reckoned with, plus the almost inconceivable incompetence of the Labour government, whose equality programme reduces everything admirable to dust on a quasi-religious whim.

The City of London’s financial Big Bang of the 1980s is looking distinctly droopy now, with understandable calls for a new British Glass-Steagall Act to separate High Street deposits from casino-style investment banking, and the apparent demise of widespread securitization.

The BBC’s often limp science strand Horizon contributed to the prevailing fin de siecle mood on Tuesday with a clumsy deconstruction of the beloved Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe. If you have an eye for these things, it’s almost as funny as an episode of Monty Python. The programme is now on iPlayer under “factual” — a joke in itself.

A series of nerdy talking heads expostulate crazy ideas in between endless shots of a big red balloon inflating and deflating, and a variety of explosions in what looks like a deserted warehouse. There’s a jolly woman from Sussex University who sees the funny side of it. Dr Kathy Romer, a cosmology lecturer, has all the best lines and is delightfully frank and refreshing. When asked what “Dark Energy” is, she replies with a grin, “I know what it is, but I’m not going to tell you”. (Pause). “Actually I don’t know, but I don’t like it and I wish it would go away.” Now we know.

A couple of the other cosmologists say things like, “Nobody asked for this, and nobody wants it”, referring to Dark Energy. As if they get to choose.

The BBC’s subtitle for the programme is, “All that we think we know about the universe may be wrong”. So much for Big Science.

The story so far: the Standard Model of the creation of the universe, i.e. the Big Bang, whereby a vast explosion billions of years ago created the cosmos out of nothing, was seen to have many flaws. Notably that explosions produce lumpy and messy results with high and low temperatures existing side by side. The universe is not like that; its temperature is constant whichever way you look. The theory of “Inflation” was flung up to bypass this problem. Yes, the entire cosmos has inflation too.

One expert says, “The trouble is, the universe is not made of the same stuff as we are. That’s very puzzling.” Another says, “Every element in my body was made in a star. I am in the universe, and the universe is in me.” Even more puzzling.

The whole of cosmology is built around mathematical equations that can be manipulated to discover “what happened in the past, and what will happen in the future”. If that sounds shaky, wait till you hear the rest of it.

Because the universe behaves as if it weighs more than it does — how do they know the weight of the universe? — they have had to invent something to make up the difference: Dark Matter. They believe they know that 24 particles exist in matter and have postulated another 24 (Super-Symmetry) with different directions of spin. That allows one of them, Dark Matter, to pass through the Earth, and us, without leaving a trace. It must be there because the mathematical model says it is. Where have we heard that before?

On top of all this, the space between galaxies, which should contain absolutely nothing, doesn’t behave like that at all. It acts as if there were no such thing as “nothing”. Unsurprisingly, the boffins have now invented undetectable Dark Energy to fill the gaps. The film depicts it as a black sludge, like tar, flooding into every space in the cosmos. No wonder Kathy Romer says she doesn’t like it and wishes it would go away.

Dark Energy makes up 75 percent of the known universe, it’s averred. Call me obtuse, but if a theory is 75 percent unprovable, shouldn’t it be ditched?

Particle physicists admit they don’t know what gives mass to matter. True to form, they have invented a particle, Higgs Boson, to add the missing mass. Let’s call this, mind games. And they’ve built the £6 billion, and rising, Large Hadron Collider with our money to find the little dot.

Around 2,500 years ago, the Buddha said that only one-quarter of the universe is visible, the rest is a kind of spirit world invisible to us. How accurate does that seem now? And what if the whole of the universe were a vast field of consciousness? Actually, it would explain all the anomalies that Big Science wrestles with.

For example, what is nothing? Why does it act like something? The field of mysticism handles these questions much better than science with its lop-sided insistence on materialism.

The Zen master Huang Po recognized the difficulty: “Men are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of the [universal consciousness].”

The English author Paul Brunton expressed this paradox, or reverse perspective thus, “What the unenlightened regard as substance, that is, the form of things, is really its negation, whereas true substance, that is the essence out of which those forms emerge, is disregarded by them as non-existent. The hardest barricade for our Western understanding to break through is this simple acceptance of the Unmanifest as ultimate reality.”

Oh, and part of the cosmos is flowing very fast in an outward direction and in a straight line. This shouldn’t be happening, say the cosmoes, and can only mean one thing: there’s another universe out there sucking chunks out of ours. If you’re still with me, you’ll know what they call this phenomenon: Dark Flow, naturally.

All we need now is a Dark Lord to preside over it all and we have a Hollywood movie — or a religion.

Mandy, report for duty immediately. This Dark Sludge is right up your street.

John Evans