All Is 'One' - Where Physics and Psychology Meet Metaphysics

"Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukow

Although it is somewhat dated (albeit its history of relativity and quantum physics remains up-to-date, except for speculative "string theories" and chaos theory), I found the "The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics" (Bantam Books, New York: 1980) to be an eye-opening read which helped affirm my belief (and experience) that at a fundamental level there is no separation, that such separation is only manifested by the ego, and that our whole universe (the "Whole") is interconnected, interwoven, pervaded by consciousness itself.

I have come to believe and understand that this all-pervading consciousness is the timeless Ground of Being, which has been witnessed by enlightened individuals, here and there, since the dawn of time. Not only that, but I have observed there has been a decided uptick in seekers and realizers of this Ground of Being in the last 120 years - a time, not coincidentally, since Eastern wisdom teachings and traditions have been disseminated in the West, and a time we have gone as a species from being largely conveyed on foot or in horse-drawn carts to building spacecraft that have, in fact, left the solar system.

(Padma Sambhava, an Eight-century Buddhist teacher who originally brought Mahayanna Buddhism to Tibet, left the following cryptic, but accurate omen: "When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the World, and the Dharma will come to the land of the red-faced people.)

The "Dancing Wu Li Masters" traces the discoveries and advances in physics over this period, a period that has come to change our entire worldview.

My favourite passage from "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", at page 31 and provided below, is a reflection on what the collaboration of the renowned psychologist, Carl Jung, and the Nobel-laureate physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, implies.

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung

"According to quantum physics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

Wolfgang G. Pauli

Jung's friend, the Nobel-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

 From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world . . .

 "If these men are correct," Gary Zhukov writes in the "The Dancing Wu Li Masters," at page 31, "then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness." (Emphasis added.)

 To pick up where "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" leaves off, I recommend David Bohm's "The Implicate Order," or any of his numerous dialogues with the enlightened spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (such as, "The Wholeness of Life"). For more information on the collaboration between Jung and Pauli, I recommend the book, "137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession," by Arthur I. Miller (W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 2009).

"The Dancing Wu Li Masters" was, for a time, available as a .pdf file at the following link: www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/dancingmasters.pdf