For me, it’s a spiritual interest.  According to classical physics, Aquinas and Aristotle and Newton among them, this world is not only orderly but that order can be uncovered, deduced.  And, once unveiled, it points to a greater force.  People of faith call that force God.  Seeing the order of the universe unveils something beyond, something greater, something which has somehow imparted meaning.  Classical physics affirms spiritual truths.

But classical physics seemed to suggest a break where there is, in the deepest levels of reality, fundamental union.  In classical physics, you come away with the perception that there’s something like two worlds:  one, a world of stuff (atoms and mass and energy) and, two, a world of intelligible order.  Most of the time those two worlds are united into one, sensory universe.  Which is precisely what enabled Newton, for instance, to posit laws of motion.  And which, at the same time, enabled him to humbly and faithfully claim: “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”

Over the last century, however, the established, prove-able laws which guided Newton’s classical universe were challenged by what is now called quantum physics: a subatomic world, a world within the stuff of the universe itself.  And it’s not as easily, universally, and scientifically observable, let alone ‘prove-able’.  Where there, once, seemed an orderly world, established by intrinsic, predictable forces and proved, so to speak, by exterior principles or laws, now there is, following quantum theory, seeming random-ness, subatomic entities spinning about and unable to be completely observed or detected or, let alone, studied and reduced to man-made principles.  Even though this quantum world seems fuzzier than proving gravity by sitting under an apple tree, it also points to a certain order and truth and a “plan”, if you will, albeit perhaps several plans and perhaps competing ones and never one plan which can be fully deduced and turned into a Theory of Everything.

I don’t understand quantum theory, and I’m still intrigued by it.  (I’m in good company. The 20^th century Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, is himself rumored to have said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”)

What I find so fascinating, even though I understand so little, is that these new vistas in modern physics seem to confirm what we Christians know about reality, that deeper level of reality, in particular.  This is the kind of reality we celebrate during Christmas.  Christmas is not just a holiday but a profound spiritual truth.  Here’s the real reality, we say: God took on flesh, our flesh, and not only came among us but became one of us.  This is the mystery we call “incarnation”.  And don’t let the flip side of the incarnation pass you by without notice, then: God also became human so that our nature, our humanity, our mass and energy and atoms and stuff would be renewed, restored, and redeemed.

John the Evangelist points to this remarkable truth in the prologue to his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word,” John writes, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…”  What John’s trying to do is shine new light on an old, old story – that God has always been a part of the world, not a distant, removed, faraway entity; that God has been breathing, inspiring, moving in and under and through this world, a very part of it.  There’s quite a quantum theory within John’s gospel:  “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. He was in the world and the world came into being through him. To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God. And the Word lived among us, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. No one has ever seen God.”

The radical message of the incarnation, then, is radical in a quantum way – order and truth, purpose and plan, intelligence and truth is not outside of the stuff of this world; no, the meaning is a living, breathing, part of that stuff.  The creation has within it, already, the power of redemption.  And when God took on our flesh God wiped away the dirt and the grime which we had allowed, generation after generation, to obscure the gifts of this marvelous creation.

This’ll change the way you live. One of the keys to salvation is to live in the way God chose, intentionally, to live – as fully human, as a fully incarnate human person.  Stop trying to be more spiritual.  Start trying to be more human, indeed fully human.  Realize that the years of distance and sin and distrust have made us leery of ourselves, but they have not wiped away that original blessing, not permanently at least.

The challenge, then, is that there’s no universal principle by which salvation is earned, save for one: we all, all of us, work out our salvation by becoming fully human, to the degree that God has made himself known, already, within.  Love, then, as we know we can love, as God has shown us how to love, giving freely and generously of the grandeur of Godself in order to become vulnerable as one of us, vulnerable even to death.  Forgive, then, as we know we can forgive, as God showed us how to forgive, from the heart.  Live, then, as God showed us how to live, “from his fullness” and yet borne from within the context of this life, this earthly, physical, particular and human life which is, all the same, mysterious, wonderful, and endowed with the mark of blessing and truth.

……….

Excerpts from a sermon preached at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Valley Lee, Maryland

Her answer, that I find “the rightness” of the pose by going within, by “feeling it” from inside out, was just well, mystifying. I struggled to comprehend how paying attention to the thoughts going round in my head, or the feelings in my toes, had any bearing on the only reality that counts, the physical one “out there” that could be measured and acted upon.

It was a few months later, while reading a book about quantum physics that I began to make the connection to what my yoga teacher was saying. I realized the ancient yogis knew thousands of years ago, what particle physics tells us today. It is our ” in here”, our paying attention, that manifests the physical world we experience. Our separation from the world “out there” is all in our mind.

Consider the quantum facts.

Every cell in our body is composed of atoms, which are composed of sub-atomic particles. When these sub-atomic particles are broken down further, they reach a point where they are no longer objects at all. They dissolve into quanta, vibrations or waveforms of compressed energy.

Quanta are not actual things. They have no dimension, no “here” – no “now”. They are waveforms of possibility spread across space and time. Quanta exist simultaneously in all possible places and states, past and present, within an infinite energy field that is as Einstein stated “the only reality”.

As outlandish as it sounds, years of research have experimentally confirmed quantum theory to an almost unimaginable accuracy. At the quantum level of reality, the “oscillations of energy” of imagination, emotions, and thoughts, are not separate from waveforms generated by fingers or toes. Our thoughts and bodies flow seamlessly past our skins into everything and each other.

Even more incredible  – it is our act of observing which collapses the energy field of all possibilities into a particle, a precise object in time and space. This ‘collapse of the wave function’, means the observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of atomic phenomena but to bring them into being.

In other words, there is no “out there” unless the “in here” looks.

Like most of us, I had heard about the paradoxes posed by quantum physics but believed they had nothing to do with my life. Now, I realized the ancient yogis had known about this deeper level of reality all along. They had developed a whole metaphysics (yoga) designed to access the deeper non-physical eternal (wave) aspect of our being.

The yogic sages – especially in the Hindu and Buddhist branches of Tantra anticipated quantum physics by claiming that a subtle vibratory energy  is the source of everything we see, feel and touch. The understanding of the body as an energy field within a greater transcendental reality was a fundamental fact. The yogis understood that we are both a three-dimensional form living in one time and place AND an infinite field of information spread across all time and space. They sought to make us conscious of how our bodies and psyche function and have meaning, within this greater interconnected reality.

They knew we are what the great yogi mystic Patanjali, called Purusha, the Divine Self that abides in all things. According to Patanjali, it is ignorance, (avida) which clouds our awareness of this higher reality. By allowing the perceptions of the material self to control our definition of the world, we believe only what we can see, feel or measure is real. So – that is what our universe then reflects. We become trapped in our perceptions of limitations.

This is why now, many years later, mirrors no longer matter. I practice quantum yoga – a commitment to creating new possibilities. The thoughts and emotions I experience are my body. In the quantum paradigm, it is the ” in here”, my paying attention, that collapses the “out there” into the physical world I perceive, legs, arms, head and toes. I am at each moment, manifesting reality out of an infinite field of possibility.

By making time to be in my body as consciously as possible, I seek to ground myself in the NOW, the unified energy field of all possible states. This dipping into the wellspring of the divine is a devotional practice that leaves me fresher, more aware, and more alive.

However, as I enter mid-life, I no longer care. It is now or never to come to grips with who I am. I can no longer hide in the closet nursing my shameful passion for all things “woo woo”. Its time for me to take seriously what I love best.

So voila, I am officially coming out as a “seeker”. What I am seeking, I’m not exactly sure, but that is the point. I seek that greater mystery, which unspoken, unseen, and unknown, I have always sensed.

I have spent years, I admit, in fruitless pursuit of smoking gun evidence of the divine. Steeped in the scientific materialist paradigm since grade school, I wanted to make a leap of faith, not in a religion or any particular doctrine, but simply in a higher transcendent reality beyond our three-dimensional experience.

Looking for proof, I devoured all the books on religious history, new age physics, neuro-theology, parapsychology, Jungian psychology, esoteric alchemy, alternative history, entheonology, geomancy, conspiracy theories, and the ancient traditions of enlightenment, I could get my hands on.

I spent hours listening to the kind of talk radio that debates whether 2012 will be the apocalypse or hearken the next evolution of man. I studied chakra yoga, transcendental meditation, energy healing, attended spiritualist congregations and sweat lodges – even met my totem animals and spirit guides.

None of it brought me any closer to the light.

The trouble wasn’t a lack of paradigm shattering evidence for a greater transcendent reality. It was me. I just couldn’t make the conversion to full time believer – in any of it. Skepticism was like a reflex, a conditioned mode of seeing I couldn’t fully dispel. I hung back like a doubting Thomas, waiting for God knows what to prove there really was a Santa Claus.

If I couldn’t make that total leap of faith – in something else out there – I fell back to believing in the world of sticks, stones, the cold, hard facts of mechanistic existence. You are born, you die, there is nothing else out there.The real question I struggled to resolve was this – how much evidence is necessary – exactly – to believe? And what piece of evidence could I possibly discover or fail to discover, that would support or contradict, any of it?

This is the paradox. Because it all comes down to the proverbial glass doesn’t it. Is it half empty or half full? Evidence exists for both sides.

On the one side is a Newtonian universe of solid matter and predictable laws and on the other is a quantum realm in which matter dissolves, time and space can bend, where ‘b’ doesn’t always follow ‘a’, and the miraculous is a possibility that can happen at any time.

My need to believe in one or the other did not change the facts. Both are necessary for a true description of reality. Yet I wanted to believe in one or the other, I couldn’t conceive otherwise. Limited possibilities or unlimited possibility? True reality couldn’t be both.

Could it?

Apparently quantum computers operate precisely on this principle. Since electrons can be in multiple places at the same time, quantum computers operate beyond the binary capabilities of ordinary computers. According to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics an electron can spin up or down in the definite states of 0 or 1 – but it can also exist in “quantum combinations” of the states 0 and 1, referred to as superposition states, whereby the electron is in two states at once. In this third state,  the electron is spinning up and down - simultaneously. 

Physicists have also created superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. In this gizmo, an electrical current travels both clockwise and anticlockwise around a superconducting circuit at the same time.

In other words, the glass is not either/or, it is indeed, both half empty and half full.

In fact, ever since we postulated that Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat, was both alive and dead – we’ve suspected that true reality is defined by a greater, holistic third state,  limited by neither possibility or impossibility, by here or there, by past or present or matter or spirit.

Like a flatlander confronting the impossible possibility of vertical dimensions – I realized it was time for me to look up, waaay up.

While my mind continually seeks to sort perceptions into dualities, I understand they are not the whole truth. In short, I no longer seek transcendence (evidence of a higher reality “out there” ) but to understand immanence (the divine in the material) – right here and right now.