Over the past few months I have posted a number of essays dealing with the strange world portrayed by modern physics and speculations as to the implications for our connection to the universe. The question, of course, is: Are we a part of a larger consciousness that persists after biological death? It is an old question with origins stretching back in time to the earliest civilizations.
For those of you who are religious, your faith imposes obvious answers. I say imposes because the business of most religious orders is to present dogma to which the faithful must adhere. There is no room for doubt or questions.
But science and philosophy are suffused with doubt. That is not to say that science and philosophy are not immune to dogma, only that they are not immune to doubt. Paradigms and theories arise to overthrow the old order as did quantum and relativity physics in the early 20th century. But the struggle to overthrow the old order meets fierce resistance eventually overcome when new truths can no longer be denied.
But let’s return to the central question: Is our consciousness connected to the universe? Or perhaps it would be wise to ask: What does it mean if our consciousness is connected to the universe? Here, I must return to Jane Goodall’s remarkable testament recorded in a farewell address just before her death:
I just hope that you understand that this life on Planet Earth isn’t the end. I believe and now I know that there is life beyond death. That consciousness survives.
This was not a declaration of religious belief but a spiritual assessment of humanity’s connection with the cosmos. It reflects some of the scientific speculation emanating from science and philosophy that has gained popular attention in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The general outlines for these speculations are that human existence and the material universe are a unity, what Indian philosophy has called Brahman—that from which all existence proceeds, and to which everything returns, and what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli labeled Synchronicity and the Unus Mundus or Dual-Aspect Monism; Synchronicity being the connection of mind and matter, perhaps with the physical mechanisms of quantum physics such as entanglement, and Monism, the unity of consciousness and the universe. For example, as Josh Datko who hosts Poetry on Tape recently asked, if synchronicity is the result of quantum entanglement could this explain shared dreams. The answer is probably yes—if you could develop a complete quantum mechanical prescription.
But these are speculative constructs, not explanations to drive belief. We can be victimized by belief that leads us into intellectual cul-de-sacs.
If anything, despite the enormous material successes of modern science, our understanding of ourselves and the universe is primitive. I have written that the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has proven that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local reality and this accounts for the validity of quantum entanglement, what Einstein dismissively called, “Spooky action at a distance.” Thus, the communication of entangled pairs of photons, electron, or perhaps minds, may occur over vast distances without the inhibitions imposed by the speed of light. Yet local reality does exist in the universe of relativity physics.
Even odder, time itself is probably an elaborate illusion with all events, past and future, spread before us as in a vast encyclopedia.
My appeal to you is to keep an open mind but do not take these speculations as real. We are confronted with mysteries without end. Generations past and future have wrestled with these enigmas throughout history and it is likely that there will be no final answer when the sun engulfs the earth in 5 billion years.
Our unbounded joy is that we are faced with a universe of possible answers from which we may pick and choose to our delight. We may speculate but we may not believe
