Science To Our Aid

The reader who is not scientifically minded may wish to miss out this page alto­gether or return to it later.

The One Reality

A founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , in her book The Secret Doctrine postulated a fundamental Unity in which all exists:

"One Absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. . . This Infinite and Eternal Cause. . . is the Rootless Root of 'all that was, is or ever shall be'. . . Devoid of all attributes ... it is 'Be-ness' rather than Being . . . and is beyond all thought or specula­tion. The teaching is. .. that existence is ONE THING, not any collec­tion of things linked together. . . . Being absolute there is nothing out­side it. It is ALL-BEING. It is indivisible, else it would not be absolute."

H.P.BIavatsky wrote over a hundred years ago when her ideas were acceptable to the very few. But from the early decades of the 20th Century a growing number of scientists have been moving away from a purely materi­alistic view of the Universe towards a holistic view. In so doing they appear to be endorsing H.P.BIavatsky's views and also moving towards a recognition of the spiritual philosophy outlined in these theosophy pages.

The New Physics and Non-Duality

Einstein's theory of relativity, Bohr's quantum theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle all point towards the concept of an Absolute Reality as postulated by H.P.BIavatsky.

Einstein accepted the idea of an underlying Field of Being when he wrote:

"There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for
the field is the only reality".

Writing in the Spectrum of Consciousness Ken Wilber indicates that consciousness within this unified field is non-dual:

'Recall the essential insight of the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Einstein - that the texture of reality is one in which the observer and the event, the subject and the object, knower and known are not separable, (i.e. they are one.) This type of knowing which is non-dual, intimate and direct, does not submit to codification and analysis.'

Implicate and Explicate Order

In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order the physicist David Bohm suggests that behind the world as we know it there is an 'implicate order' from which the material becomes explicit by unfolding like a rolled-out carpet. He says:

“This implicate order implies a reality immensely beyond matter. Matter is merely a ripple in this background and the ocean of energy is not primarily in time and space at all.”

The Holographic Model

Bohm's concepts developed from holography which is a method of lensless photography in which light scattered by an object forms a shape­less interference pattern called a hologram.

When a laser beam is played on the hologram the original wave pattern is regenerated and a three dimensional image appears.

What is important to our thesis of wholeness is that any portion of this hologram can reconstruct the entire image.

Bohm pictured reality as an unbroken whole in which every fragment - every cell, atom or particle of matter - contains the entire universe. 'A world in a grain of sand' as the poet Blake put it.

While Bohm was developing his theory Karl Pribram, a brain researcher, was also working on the holographic model and realising that it applied to the functioning of the brain. The holographic model being developed by both emphasises the unity and wholeness of reality, which is the basic tenet of theosophical teachings and of Eastern philosophy.

Intelligence Life Fields

Two scientists Burr and Ravitz discovered energy fields around living things which they called fields of life or L-fields. Rupert Sheldrake, a biolo­gist, in his book A New Science Of Life extends this concept of L-fields to 'morphogenetic fields' which from a non-physical level guiding the growth and behaviour of living things.

He uses this concept to account for the 'hundredth monkey phenom­enon' where the behaviour of washing potatoes newly learnt by monkeys in a Japanese island suddenly expanded to monkeys on adjacent islands.

He hypothesises these fields provide the means for intelligent communi­cation within a species without limitations of time and distance.

The 'Gaia Hypothesis' propounded by Dr Lovelock recognises a total global ecosystem in which Mother Earth intelligently provides the right conditions at the right time for evolution of living things and ensures that everything works within an overriding unity.

 Peter Russell, author of The Awakening Earth calls this intelligent control ‘The Global Brain'.

Readers will realise that these scientists are talking about what in Theosophy is called the Divine Mind - the Universal Intelligence which, as an aspect of the Absolute Reality postulated in The Secret Doctrine, supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of Cosmic evolution.