Quantum mechanics and consciousness - Part 8/8: Origin of these ideas

8. Origin of these ideas

I have presented these ideas as worth of consideration on their own, but they really have a long history in a variety of contexts. The basic idea that causation only truly works from the mind into the brain (and not vice versa) is not a popular one today. However, it can be traced back to ‘non-standard’ insights of people such as Plotinus (b. 205), Boehme (b. 1575), Swedenborg (b. 1688) and some other traditions. Swedenborg was well educated as a physicist and then physiologist, so I find his accounts the most detailed and useful. Of course, he knew nothing of quantum mechanics (only Newtonian mechanics), so I have had to ‘re-apply’ his principles in the light of what we now know about the physical world. He has the clearest presentation of the idea of ‘conditional forward causation’ (he calls it ‘influx into uses’), and he gives the most complete account of the ‘correspondences’ that exist between mental and bodily things. For a brief summary of his ideas, see [15]. 

My References

[8] I. J. Thompson, "Discrete Degrees Within and Between Nature and Mind," in Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary Approach, A. Antonietti, Ed., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008, pp. 99-125.
[13] I. J. Thompson, "The Consistency of Physical Law with Divine Immanence," Science & Christian Belief, vol. 5, pp. 19-36, 1993. 
[14] I. J. Thompson, Starting Science from God, Pleasanton, CA: Eagle Pearl Press, 2011. 
[15] I. J. Thompson, "Swedenborg and Modern Science," Scientific and Medical Network Newsletter, vol. 26, pp. 3-8, 1989. 

Previous post here.

Spiritual Physics

Streamed live on May 11, 2015

Is there a connection between spirituality and physics? What is the nature of the mind? In this episode, host Curtis Childs from the Swedenborg Foundation and featured guest and physicist Dr. Ian J. Thompson explore the answers to these questions from spiritual and scientific perspectives.

Discussion points:
--Meeting a Mind
--The Substance of Consciousness
--Energy and Distance
--Materialism Issues
--The Interaction of Planes

Special thanks to our featured guest Dr. Ian J. Thompson. Dr. Thompson is a nuclear physicist in the Nuclear Theory and Modeling Group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA, having until 2006 been a professor of physics at the University of Surrey, UK. His research deals with the coupled-channels and few-body models for nuclear structure and reactions, especially concerning halo nuclei. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics.

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References and Downloads:
Check out "Starting Science From God: Rational Scientific Theories from Theism" by Ian J. Thompson

Book Expo at Bryn Athyn College on Saturday April 11

Bryn Athyn College

Book Expo 2015
Science and Spirituality throughout History

April 11, 2015
9:00 am – 4:00 pm
Brickman Center, 2945 College Drive,
Bryn Athyn, PA 19009

Join us for a day of books and talks.
Browse, read, discuss, and take some home!

• Follow spirituality weaving through early history, sciences, philosophy,
  medicine, abolition of slavery, child labor rights, and more
  
• Learn new spiritual paradigms and envision the afterlife
  
• Learn the why of two Testaments and even a third
  
• Join authors for short talks, followed by Q & A
  

Enjoy a great variety of books!

A sampling of book titles publishers

• Osteopathy and Swedenborg
  
• Starting Science From God
  
• Religion and Science: Big Bang and Chaotic Dynamics
  
• Swedenborg’s Hidden Influence on Kant
  
• Swedenborg, Fourier and the America of the 1840’s
  
• The Triune Word
  
• Swedenborg’s Scientific Works
  

• Bryn Athyn College Press,
• Swedenborg Scientific Association
• Fountain Publishing
• Swedenborg Foundation
• General Church of the New Jerusalem Publications 
• Ian Thompson

Organizer: Lisa Childs: ncapbooks@gmail.com 

More details at www.swedenborgstudy.com/bookexpo.htm 

Images and Correspondences of God in Quantum Physics

Let us find what connections we can see between God and Quantum Nature. If we find some relation or correspondence between them, that should help us to understand both a little better.

We know there must be some connection, since the God is Life Itself, and hence the source of all the power and activity that we have. All spiritual, mental and physical things must depend on God for their sustained existence and capacities for action. That dependence is what theism asserts.

Let us now focus on the beginning and the end of the chain of being: God as the source and the physical world as the final effect. Let us omit the middle stages for now.

God, we should know from our religious background, is all of

1. a God of Love, 
2. a God of Wisdom, and 
3. a God of outreaching activity.  

The love of a being is its substance, so Love is the substance of God. There should be no surprise there.

Wisdom is concerns all true thoughts. Now thoughts are about the forms of things. To think of something is to consider by abstraction its structure and properties, and not to interact with it directly. God's wisdom is the source of all true thoughts, so we can think of divine wisdom as the complete set of true forms. But forms of what? Forms of some substance, of course. So, with God, wisdom is the form of divine love. 

Outreaching activity is the proceeding divine that created, sustains and enlivens the world. It is therefore somethings specific for each part of the world, and it enables us to make our own actions.

Quantum reality, we should know from our physics education or from our reading, concerns collections of things that have the following features:

1. some energy, comprised of kinetic and potential energy,
2. a wave function that spreads out with some form, following Shroedinger's equation, and 
3. some specific outcomes that result from measurements produced with some probability.

The energy of a quantum particle is represented mathematically by an operator called the Hamiltonian operator H(t) for that particle. The Hamiltonian usually has two terms: the kinetic energy term and the potential energy term. We assume (for simplicity now) that these are given.

The Shroedinger equation, namely

,

describes how the wave function  varies with time and space. Wave functions are mathematical objects, and are therefore forms. Forms of something, necessarily (since the physical world cannot be made just out of abstract forms), but forms of what?

The outcomes that result from measurements depend on probabilities calculated by the square-modulus of the wave function ||².    Wave functions therefore describe (by means of their square modulus) the propensities for specific outcomes.  The substance of whatever the wavefunctions describe is therefore that propensity. (Here the introduction to this kind of inference.) 

The measurements in quantum mechanics are not yet properly described in quantum mechanics.  That is why there are so many interpretations of quantum physics. Their common thread (in all except the many-worlds interpretation) is that measurement is some kind of selection between distinct outcomes. Measurement, then is the final act of the quantum world in the transition from a partially-determined future to a fully-determined past. I wrote a whole book about this process. 

Comparing God and Quantum Reality, we see some similarities:

1. Love is like the energy of a particle.
2. Wisdom is like the form of the propensity of the particle.
3. Measurements are the outreaching activity that are the final effects.

I am certainly not saying these are identities. Love is not energy, but like energy. Wisdom is not a spatiotemporal form, but like a form. The divine outreaching acts are not measurements, but are like measurements. All these 'likes' are because the divine elements and the physical elements function in similar ways. These functional similarities are called correspondences by Swedenborg, who has described them in more detail than I have found elsewhere. According to him, they arise because all things of creation, not just humans, are kinds of images of God.

You may have considered the deep conflict in quantum mechanics to be between 'waves' and 'particles'. Lee Woofenden recently, then, tried to find the divine correspondences of waves and particles. 

However, 'particles' never appeared in by description above.  Let me quote from my book:

One feature of the present account of substance is that [quantum] objects need not be located in small fixed volumes of space as, for example, the corpuscles or particles of classical physics would be. The propensity fields that have been defined do not need to have any special ‘center’ distinguishable from all the other places in the field. They may have no center at all that could be regarded as the ‘true substance’ whereby the surrounding field could be regarded as just the ‘sphere of influence’ of the central substance.

It is commonly believed by many physicists, that high energy scattering experiments allow us to conclude that fundamental particles like electrons, quarks, etc. are point particles, like real objects of zero size. However, this inference is incorrect. What the experiments show is that there is no lower limit to the size that the wave packet of an electron (for example) may be compressed. They never show that there is actually a point particle, as this would contradict the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle by requiring infinite energy to be used in producing it. Some other objects (e.g. atoms or nuclei) do have a lower limit of compression, and this is interpreted as arising from a composite internal structure. No matter how small we then compress the wave packet for an atom’s centre of mass motion, the atom as a whole cannot be made arbitrarily small. At all times, both fundamental particles and composite objects have some varying finite size that depends on time and circumstances and may be legitimately said to occupy the volume of this size in space. Whether they also fill that volume depends on the probabilities of interaction with instruments, which may be small or large and so are a matter of degree in a similar manner to the way that air ‘fills’ a room according to its pressure. 

A substance-field of propensities may have a variable spatial size. Sometimes it behaves more like a spread-out wave, and when at other times it interacts, it behaves like a localized particle. (Starting Science From God, pp. 47-48)

Appearances of Reincarnation

According to Emanuel Swedenborg, we only live once on earth. After death we live in a spiritual world and move eventually to a permanent place that depends on the spiritual nature we created by our actions on earth. We are not reborn or reincarnated again on earth, to have another attempt to do better next time.

Historically, however, there have been many stories about reincarnation, notably the "transmigration of souls" (metempsychosis) that Plato describes in the Republic. Reincarnation has been an essential part of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is interesting to see when it became popular in the west. We might assume it came with the great interest in spiritualism in Europe and America that started in the 1840s, which lead to a great many scientists becoming interested in it, with the formation of the learned societies of psychical research in the period 1850-1900. But it did not: there was no hint of reincarnation among those beliefs. Instead, it came through the books of theosophists like Annie Besant and was imported into western thought from the early 1900s. It has subsequently become rather widespread among spirit communicators, and it is especially dominant in the "channelled works" written under dictation from spirit sources that claim higher knowledge.

This essay is not concerned with the moral or theological basis of reincarnation, but discusses instead the evidence that has been presented in its support. The idea might simply be regarded as mistaken if it were not for the evidence that has been described for example by Ian Stevenson in his 1966 book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. There are two main kinds of evidence. The first is the evidence of birth marks in young children as shown by Stevenson. The second comes from hypnotic regressions, in which a subject under hypnosis is "taken back" to relive his past lives. Often a great deal of historical evidence is produced that cannot be plausibly only invented; realistic names may be given; and unusual languages may be spoken fluently. Sometimes these pieces of evidence are spontaneously recalled.

Most recently there has been regression to the "between life" status and reports of discussion with spiritual advisors about the choice of life into which to incarnate, and afterwards a review of the "lessons learned" from the reincarnations. Taken all together, these pieces of evidence are sufficient to convince a lawyer like Victor Zammit that reincarnation does in fact occur (see Ch. 24 of his book A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife: Irrefutable Objective Evidence).

I am not going to rehearse the numerous details of the observations and histories here. Rather, I want to suggest alternative interpretations of both of these kinds of evidence, interpretations moreover which are to be expected if Swedenborg’s descriptions of the spiritual world are correct. To start with, therefore, I remind the reader of some aspects of Swedenborg’s account.

According to Swedenborg, the conjunction between heaven and earth is by means of beings in the spiritual world:

With every individual there are good spirits and evil spirits. Through good spirits man has conjunction with heaven, and through evil spirits with hell. These spirits are in the world of spirits, which lies midway between heaven and hell. … When these spirits come to a man they enter into his entire memory, and thus into his entire thought, evil spirits into the evil things of his memory and thought, and good spirits into the good things of his memory and thought. These spirits have no knowledge whatever that they are with man; but when they are with him they believe that all things of his memory and thought are their own; neither do they see the man, because nothing that is in our solar world falls into their sight. (Heaven and Hell 292)

That is, there are indeed close to us beings who have lived in the past and in whose memory there are indeed descriptions of past ages and past languages. Those memories are not active, so there is no interference with the current life. Sometimes, however, there is some ‘leakage’ of that memory into the current consciousness of an individual on earth, and, then, strange voices or memories from past lives appear that he attributes (erroneously) to his own past life. Swedenborg relates:

If a spirit were to speak from his own memory with a man the man would not know otherwise than that the thoughts then in his mind were his own, although they were the spirit's thoughts. This would be like the recollection of something which the man had never heard or seen. That this is so has been given me to know from experience. This is the source of the belief held by some of the ancients that after some thousands of years they were to return into their former life, and into everything they had done, and in fact, had returned. This they concluded because at times there came to them a sort of recollection of things that they had never seen or heard. This came from an influx from the memory of spirits into their ideas of thought. (Heaven and Hell 256).

It appears that the normally-quiescent memories of the associated spirits may be specifically awakened during hypnotic sessions, when the current individual’s mind is quieted. The minds of the spirits may then be aroused to think of their own previous lives. It thus appears that memories are not "labeled" with their originator, so whatever memories are recalled in hypnosis may afterwards be appropriated to whoever experiences them (not necessarily the originator).

What about the bodily birthmarks and scars that Stevenson found on many Asian children? In some cases the alleged cause of death in an immediate past life is reflected by a birthmark in the present life, since investigators could find and identify by family interviews the life history of a matching recently-deceased person. For example, Stevenson found that in cases of violent death the child may show a birthmark where he was knifed, shot or from whatever caused his death. These cases definitely do not appear as "spiritual possession" as described in psychiatric cases because the child’s life is otherwise normal. Zammit argues that these phenomena cannot be attributed to extrasensory perception, to fraud, to cryptomesia (memories previous acquired but since forgotten), to inherited memory, to collective unconscious, or to possession. In his mind, that leaves reincarnation as the only possibility.

We note that many (but not all) of Stevenson’s examples come from cultures in which reincarnation is the expectation. Moreover, many of them involve violent deaths. In that situation, what expectations should we envisage in the recently-resurrected spirit in the spiritual world? I should expect that many such persons want to reincarnate, if only to resume their earthly life cut short. Mostly, we can conclude, they become associated spirits with young children. The child’s memories appear between the ages of two and four, and then the association fades between the ages of five and eight. It is somewhat surprising to me that they manage to produce birthmarks and scars on the children, but, whatever the details are, they do not support the claim of the reincarnation of a single person any more than they support Swedenborg’s theory of associated spirits.

What then about the apparent memories between earthly lives, where events in the spiritual world are recalled under hypnosis? An author such as Michael Newton in his book Journey of Souls has given many stories of people recalling these. If we take these as veridical, this appears to be strong evidence for reincarnation. I argue, however, that some things like these should be expected in the spiritual world described by Swedenborg.

To understand what is happening, we have to consider events in the quotation Heaven and Hell 292 above from the point of view of the spirits involved. Imagine what must happen. They are living like "normal people" in the spiritual world, and then (somehow) they are transformed to be associated spirits with us (on earth) and with no active memory of their own. I suggest that this process appears to them just like reincarnation. We should expect there to be some discussion beforehand with their advisors concerning with whom to best become associated. We would expect that any decisions be taken with their long-term spiritual objectives in mind (with concurrence of the Lord). Then, after some period, they return to their friends and advisors in the spiritual world. (That period might not be a whole earthly lifetime, but they may perhaps not be able to judge time scales in the same way as us.) Moreover, many such "reincarnations" should be expected during life in the spiritual world, before their permanent place is found.

Again, I can envisage that some memories of associated spirits can be awakened under hypnosis and retrieved, as if they were the memories of the earth individual. Thus can not only "past lives" be "recalled" in this way, but also "between life" events. Moreover, something like "successive reincarnations" can and do occur which involve persons in the spiritual world. I can easily imagine this process being inaccurately described as the reincarnation, not of associated spirits, but of our actual selves, especially since the memories can hardly be distinguished. So there is reincarnation, but not as we know it.

Originally posted at the New Church Perspective blog.

Can there be Esoteric Knowledge?

Parallel to the standard 'exoteric' view of the state (whether of the established church, or of established science), there have long been other esoteric views about mind, spirituality and religion, that have been somewhat different, even radically different. Most of us feel that we are party to one or more of these esoteric perspectives, and, of those, most will also feel a considerable tension between these rare beliefs and those of our universities, industries and government. Furthermore, there are many apparent discrepancies between different esoteric schemes.

Our challenge is unify the inner and the outer, to find our integrity again. We have to creatively resolve, especially within ourselves, the tension between the disparate elements. Standard views will have to be considerably extended, and the esoteric themes will have to be developed into considerably more detail.

Fortunately, we have at least a few illustrious predecessors who give us indications of the way this could possibly be done, by telling us how they resolved these tensions. Here,  I begin with Emanuel Swedenborg.

From different religious and esoteric traditions, we hear general concepts such as that

• ‘Humans are created in the image of God’, and
• ‘As above, so below’,

but is there sufficient detail here? It is clear that if we are to develop a new science from these views, then we need considerably more detail about one or more of ‘God’, ‘above’ and/or ‘below’.

For example, if our principal view of the Divine as ‘an unknowable unity’, then it is not clear how to carry on to make a science. Conversely, if we view God as having arbitrary omnipotence, then ‘anything is possible’, and again a rational science is difficult to imagine. Alternatively, we can speculate endlessly, with enormous variation, to form rational schemes which describe the essential features of our physical world combined with some new spiritual features. To induce specific, workable and useful knowledge, I believe that we need some guidance from someone who already knows. Otherwise we are guessing in the dark.

Thus, again we are obliged to consider the knowledge and wisdom of some of our predecessors. We may consider this either as inspiration or revelation, but, whatever the source and whatever the means, we have to decide of ourselves which to consider. In this blog I am trying to develop and apply the knowledge presented by Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg is particularly useful because of his position as ‘rational visionary’ within the Western Christian tradition. Not that he leaves this tradition unchanged, but that, more clearly than does Plotinus for example, he explains in much detail the visionary and mystical contents of many of the outer forms of Christianity.

Are the ideas of theistic science common knowledge? Or are they esoteric? Are they part of ‘science of consciousness’? In the past, only those with esoteric interests have found these ideas. They are commonly only found by going beyond ‘literal meanings’ of religious, to various esoteric texts. But what we want should not be esoteric, but common knowledge! They should be part of everyone’s knowledge who is interested. Just as science is today: so they should be part of science, namely the science of consciousness.

Furthermore, they should not be esoteric because we are somehow ashamed of the new theories. We should be able to tell them to our neighbors without belittling them or their everyday efforts to be friendly, faithful, loving and useful.

We may intuitively agree with the above principles. But Swedenborg gives reasons for them all. Let us follow these reasons, and develop a theistic science to see what must be in the ‘science of consciousness’ for these principles to hold.

www.beginningtheisticscience.com

How Cohen's Nondualism is almost Theism

We continue to look at some statements of traditional nondualism that still appear in Cohen's presentation, and consider how they may be yet ever-so-slightly changed so as to be consistent with theism, while keeping a spiritual impact in form very similar to his original intention. This concludes the discussion started here and continued here.

That's when there is no longer any distinction between the inherent perfection of the Self Absolute and that response that is its expression in the world of time and space [p. 17] According to theism, everything good in the world of time and space is in fact belonging to God: it appears as if it is our own when we perform good act, but we must never claim ownership for ourselves and to become 'as God' (Gen 3:5).

To the question ''The ego can claim enlightenment for itself?'', Cohen replies ''Yes, and unfortunately it often does. But if the individual's motivation is pure, if there is a foundation of deep and profound humility, then the realization will not be corrupted by the desire for personal gain, and that's very rare indeed.'' [p. 21] It is clear that nondualism itself has nothing in its logic to stop 'atman = Atman = Brahman' to be reversed as 'Brahman = Atman = atman', and the Infinite claimed for oneself. Cohen's response points to lack of personal gain, but this response begins to make sense in a theistic framework where there is a distinction between Divine and personal objectives.

Cohen describes an early experience as ''that all of life is One that the whole universe and everything that exists within it, seen and unseen, known and unknown, is one conscious, glorious, intelligent Being that is self-aware. Its nature is Love but it is a love that is so overwhelming in its intensity that even to experience the faintest hint of it is almost unbearable for the human body. I saw in that moment that there is no such thing as death, that life has no beginning and no end.'' [p. 31-32] This wonderful experience is correct in almost every detail to the theist, only one identification needs to be remade. This, that really it is 'the life of the whole universe and everything that exists within it ... is one Being that is self-aware'. Since the Divine Life everywhere permeates and sustains the whole universe, one may be forgiven for missing the distinction between what is Divine (essentially infinite & overwhelming) and what is created (essentially finite & underwhelming).

Cohen sees our representation of the Divine as like a mirror [p. 45] which should be spotless. In theism, the manner of representation of the Infinite in the finite creature is more complicated than as a mirror, and in fact takes a whole biological body with all its myriad structures and functions to represent God properly. Discussion of this, however, is beyond the scope of this essay.

Our True Self is always paying attention in a way that we are usually not conscious of. And when we discover this Self - this mysterious depth that is already awake - we find that which is miraculous. We discover who we truly are. It's the Self that we cannot see with the mind, but when we experience it directly we will understand what it means to be enlightened. And when we liberate this Self that mysteriously sees and knows what we cannot see or know with our conscious mind, we will begin to respond to life in ways that, left to our own devices, we never could. [p. 76] Cohen is here using the phrase 'True Self' to refer to what theists call the internal spiritual mind. Most of us only come to this state after death, but then Cohen's description is remarkably accurate in describing a new 'heavenly proprium' (as Swedenborg calls it) that cannot be seen by our existing natural minds.

Cohen talks of the revelation of ''true conscience'', which is the unexpected manifestation of intense compassion. True conscience emerges from that very same mysterious part of our own self; it expresses a kind of care that the personality could never understand. It's the true heart, which is not the heart that we normally identify with the personality. [p. 77] Again we see Cohen expressing views that could not have come from traditional nondualism, but which clearly come from a person (or God) who works in a theistic framework. As he says beautifully, ''The degree to which we are able to liberate ourselves from self-concern will be the degree to which we are able to recognize that our true nature as human beings is love.'' He is only mistaken in thinking ''It happens automatically. This is one of the miracles of human life.'' It is well known that the God of theism mostly operates behind the scenes.

In the impersonal view, which is the enlightened perspective, the ego and the entire personal world that it creates is not seen as being real. That world is revealed to be empty of meaning, value, and purpose, ultimately serving only to perpetuate the existence of a separate self that doesn't really exist. [p. 104]Cohen speaks from the nondualist tradition, but this is immediately contradicted by the next page, which has a purely theistic observation: When that impersonal Self Absolute begins to emerge in consciousness as a living presence, the ''personal," instead of being the impenetrable fortress that the separate ego abides in, becomes a permeable vessel through which the impersonal Self Absolute seeps into this world. [p. 105] It is the idea of theism that the internal spiritual self can be modelled as a vessel that receives the Divine sustaining influx. This useful idea of a 'permeable vessel' is a development of strict nondualism toward the ideas of theism.

Cohen agrees that ''there's really nothing personal in either the absolute or the relative dimension of our experience,'' [p. 105] and insists that the ''enlightened perspective always points us to that which is singular, empty of anything personal, and free from any and all motivation that comes from ego.'' [p. 105] This reveals a failure to recognise the true nature of person as constituted by love and wisdom, a constitution that in theism applies primarily to God as the Lord, and then derivatively to us as persons sustained by influx. There is no 'ego compulsion' in the Lord, and when we conform ourselves to his life there need be hardly any in us either.

Cohen seeks ''That place of absolute singularity [which] is where true freedom and enlightened understanding are found. That is where the relative and the Absolute, the personal and the impersonal, merge and become one. In that mysterious place, they become one unbroken universal unfolding that is free from the bondage of duality.'' [p. 107]  Here, lacking the conceptual means to discriminate Source and creation, or between personal loves and Infinite Loves, Cohen has to resort to paradoxical assertions to make his point.

Cohen ends with the contradiction mentioned earlier, that ''This apparent paradox - that everything is already perfect and everything must change - is the complete picture of what enlightenment is all about.'' [p. 115] He says that paradoxes for the unenlightened mind may still be in his system, because ''the mind exists in and as duality itself, and therefore, by definition, cannot see beyond it to that place where no duality exists'' [p. 116]. Swedenborg as a theist agrees that a full understanding of the genuine truth concerning spirit and nature awaits the enlightenment at comes from the eventual awakening of our inner spiritual mind, but would insist that partial or 'apparent truths' may still enter our understanding even now, and may usefully portray spiritual reality without any essential contradictions. This allows some kind of rational understanding of spirituality, even if it is still incomplete. Sometimes, theistic portrayal may be more indirect, using representations in the structure of Sacred Scriptures, in order to allow a more external understanding.

We see from this examination of Cohen's book ''Living Enlightenment'' that the actual practice and understanding of 'nondual discipleship' requires ideas that go beyond traditional Advaita Vedanta. Many of these ideas turn out to be very similar to those advocated for example by Emanuel Swedenborg in his rational account of how theism should be understood. In that case, there is no need to hid behind paradoxes.

Comparing Nondualism with Theism (I)

Nondualism has attracted renewed interest in the West in recent decades, through the introduction of esoteric Hindu & Buddhist religious philosophies, and with the support of writers such as Ken Wilber and leaders such as Andrew Cohen. Traditional nondualism, in its purest form, is generally taken to be that of Shankara, and Georg Feuerstein summarizes the advaita realization as follows: ''The manifold universe is, in truth, a Single Reality. There is only one Great Being, which the sages call Brahman, in which all the countless forms of existence reside. That Great Being is utter Consciousness, and It is the very Essence, or Self (Atman) of all beings."

These teachings are themselves to contribute to enlightenment, a spiritual transformation in which the individual is profoundly changed, to have some kind of liberation from 'the bondage of conditioned existence'. These transformations may be sudden or progressive, and those to whom it happens typically want to share their fortune with others to lead in them in the same direction, with the aim, inter alia, of easing them of their ignorance and troubles.

The Moral Problem with Nondualism

The well-known 'moral objection' to nondualism is that it does not tell the unenlightened (or enlightened, for that matter) how to live. Classically, the world is recognized as being either completely unreal, or only partially real, and the nondual teaching does not in any way address the ethical or moral dimension of human life. Tradition in Hinduism deals with this issue by restricting the individuals to whom the absolute teachings were revealed to those who have already fulfilled demanding moral and ethical qualifications for discipleship. And even more than that, Shankara himself states that the qualifications for discipleship also demanded an extraordinary degree of detachment from and transcendence of worldly desires.

Now, however, nondualism is available to everyone who can browse bookshops, libraries and websites. Not a few these days are attracted to nondualism precisely because of the disconnection between spirituality and morality, as they see thereby the possibility of some kind of salvation for everyone (including themselves) irrespective of their own moral life. However, a modern sensibility has been brought to bear on the subject, one that has been influenced by Christianity, with the result that nondualism as taught today has developed in interesting and subtle ways. The purpose of this essay is to examine those changes, and compare them with what might be expected from a theistic perspective.

Before proceeding, I remind you of the relevant essentials of what it means for a view to be theistic. Theism is the view that there is an Infinite Absolute that is the source, sustainer and redeemer of creation. In particular this Source is Love and Wisdom themselves, and just as these are the essence of human spirituality, in the Source they are the essence of a Divine Human nature, who is the Lord God of the whole universe. Rational creatures living on planets are created to be distinct of the Source, but are sustained and saved in their lives by conforming themselves to receive the Love and Wisdom from the Absolute, not just on Earth but everywhere necessary, in order to perform good uses from love by means of wisdom. Such an account is derived in most part from Emanuel Swedenborg's "Divine Love and Wisdom", where it is intended to be a account that is both rational and empirical, and which can be understood eventually without paradoxes.

Is the Life of a Nondualist Paradoxical?

Avoiding paradoxes where possible is a good thing for two reasons. Most fundamentally, it is desirable because, from a contradiction, it is strictly possible to logically derive any thesis whatsoever. The only way to avoid that is to have further qualifying conditions; so why not make the situation clear from the beginning? The second reason is that the promulgation of ideas is much easier when they do not appear to have visible inconsistencies.

The next post will examine how a modern nondualist practitioner Andrew Cohen addresses these issues.

Does Plotinus tell us about theistic science? A review of Nature Loves to Hide by Shimon Malin

This is an ambitious book, that starts from quantum physics, incorporates Whitehead's process philosophy, and then suggests that some theistic ideas from Plotinus are relevant to an overall understanding of nature, mind and God. This is certainly a worthy aim, and if achieved would have important consequences for theistic science, but, while the details are initially extensive, the later chapters are more suggestive sketches.

Shimon Malin is a physicist who has been thinking long about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and has excellent explanations of the problems in the way of achieving a ‘sensible’ interpretation. He starts by explaining the influence of Ernst Mach’s positivism on Einstein's formulation of relativity. Mach also influenced Heisenberg's construction of quantum mechanics in 1924, but by then Einstein’s position had changed. "Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning," Einstein told Heisenberg, "but it is nonsense all the same ... on principle it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe."
In this book Malin follows Heisenberg’s ‘potentiality’ view, to see quantum objects as ‘fields of potentiality’. This goes some way to describing how physicists think in practice, and gives, I agree, the best realistic account of the quantum world. Malin, however, still want to marry this view with Bohr's account of quantum states as ‘what we can know’ rather than ‘what is’. He reconciles this by claiming that the ‘quantum state of a quantum system is understood as representing the epistemic available or potential knowledge about the system’, and holds that this is necessary in view of the apparent faster-than-light correlations in non-local quantum systems. The long-standing measurement problem is solved by using some ideas worked out after talking to Dirac (a difficult process, as he amusingly explains), whereby ‘nature makes a choice’ when there is no longer any possibility of interference.
All these ideas are then linked to Whitehead’s process philosophy, where reality does not consist of continuous substances, but intermittent throbs of experiences that give actual occasions of selection events. The experiences themselves, he surmises, are the ‘acts of looking’ (as in Bohr’s interpretation of quantum physics) that ‘create their subject just as they create themselves’.

Malin furthermore tries to link his potentiality fields to Whitehead, but here, I believe, he is on shakier ground. He claims that ‘the transition from potentiality to actuality is a central element in Whitehead’, but in fact there is no ‘potentiality’ in Whitehead's mature philosophy (1927), only some suggestions, not adopted, in earlier work. Whitehead does not have any sense of ‘efficacious potentiality’ in his Process and Reality, only a ‘potency’ that is more like an abstract ‘possibility’. Malin’s view of potentialities, as partly epistemic, also plays down their causal role compared with Heisenberg or Popper, and furthermore leads to the curious position that potentialities are ‘eternal’ and ‘unchanging’. There is a persistent confusion in the book between the real potentialities in the physical (and biological and mental) worlds, and the abstract eternal objects which are the possible forms of such realities. The former have causal powers to actually do something, the latter do not. This difference is deliberately blurred in Malin’s book, because he tends to believe the mathematical physicists such as Schrödinger when they want to say that nature is really ‘form’ rather than ‘substance’: nothing but ‘pure shape’.

The next and most adventurous step in this book is to link all the above ideas with the ‘many levels of being’ ideas of Plotinus that stem from Plotinus' view of creation as an 'overflowing from God'. Malin is particularly struck by Plotinus’ view that each level of being is produced by the one above it through ‘contemplation, which is not different from mere presence’. No effort is required, apparently: merely looking is sufficient to create multiple levels, eventually leading to the physical world. The similarity of this view to the production of actual events in quantum mechanics by (mere) ‘acts of looking’ convinces Malin that there is a deeper connection between Plotinus and quantum physics, and we might think of a foundation for theistic science.

Again, I believe, both Malin and Plotinus suffer through only considering contemplation, as sight in the understanding, rather than whatever power, love or energy there may be in the will. Malin mentions the possibility of love being efficacious, but only as a throw-away remark in reference to Empedocles. The absence of this second aspect has produced a world view in which everything is thought / form / looking / awareness, and nothing is efficacious / substantial / love / energy. Any scientific theism must tell us about love, and about substance, but Malin's view does neither.

We might hope that Malin goes on to discover the ideas of thinkers after Plotinus, such as Swedenborg, who has certainly advanced from Plotinus’ position. Swedenborg's views do explain how love and being (substance) are related to power and energy, and thus develops a view of humanity that allows us hearts as well as heads, and hence life as well as looking.

Now doubt we will be discussing this further!