The Universe, Relativity and the Present Moment: Ancient and Modern Perspectives

"Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their part in the causation of every event that happens. Remark the intimacy of the skein, the complexity of the web."

-- Marcus Aurelius --
("Meditations," IV:41)

Written nearly two thousand years ago, these comments on the non-dualistic nature of the universe by Marcus Aurelius - a Roman Emperor more famous for his book of "Meditations," than all his victories on the battlefield - seem remarkably modern.  Consider the following quote by Albert Einstein:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Do not the comments of the Roman Empire's great "philosopher-king' and the father of the "New Physics" talk of the same reality, reminding us that we are separated from a holistic, non-dual universe only by our consciousness?

Einstein once wryly described relativity as being the same process by which holding one's hand on a hot stove for a few moments seems like hours, while hours spent talking to a  beautiful woman seems like minutes. For his part, Marcus Aurelius noted the following:

"Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man's equal possession, but what has once gone is not ours. Our loss therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation from the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or forever. Secondly, that when the longest and shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his."

The Sufis: Lovers of God (with Irina Tweedie)

"There is only one omnipotent, all-pervading God, perfect Spirit. There is no other being in the universe except That. All other beings and all other things of the universe are part of Him. It is He who is the only Great Master, the secret Guiding Power inherent in every soul. He is the only Friend, the only real Beloved of every soul, its origin and its destination. There is only one great brotherhood of all man, regardless of race, sex, religion, caste or class. There is only one Truth, which is the knowledge of the essence of our very being, that is who we are, from where we are, and where we are going. There is only one path to perfection. Losing oneself in God in order to reach our goal, our ultimate destination, the union with the Supreme Spirit."

-- Five Tenets of Sufi Belief --

"Sufis are lovers," says Naqshbandi Sufi teacher, Irina Tweedie, in the video below. "Great prophets, great saints, great leaders of religion - like Christ, like Buddha, like Krishna, like Rama - they didn't found a religion, they were lovers. They were lovers of God. They just lived the vision, and some of them died for it. And that's all. Religion was made after them. The followers after them made a religion. This is very important. They themselves didn't make a religion. They were inspired human beings. They were lovers.

"And why," she asks, "were they lovers?" Because, she asserts emphatically, "God is love!"

"Love is the very essence of God," she notes, "and we are made in his image. A human being is love itself, absolutely. From the very tip of your hair, to the very toes of your feet. Only deluded by this magnificent kaleidoscope of illusion here, by the beauty of this world, we forgot it. And then, of course, the ego - the little self - steps in. And, the ego is the only evil in the world, there is no other.  Because the ego is difference. 'I am different from you.'"

"Self-realization can be achieved on any path," Ms. Tweedie observes. "There were very great Christian saints, very great Hindu saints, enormously great Buddhist saints. And let's hope one day we will be saints, but without being boring. Just happy saints, full of love. All Sufi gatherings are full of fun, full of love."

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The "Journey From God"

"We all come from God, but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of this world, leaving behind,"the clouds of glory' of our true Home. The Sufi calls this the "journey from God," a journey of forgetfulness in which we leave Paradise behind. But there are those who never quite forget, who keep a distant memory buried deep within them. As a result this world never quite seems like home; there is often a sense of not quite belonging, not fitting in. Mystics are strangers in this world, just because they remember their real home."

-- LLewellyn Vaughan-Lee --
("Love Is a Fire: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home")

 In his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth enters the sublime, echoing the teachings of the Sufi, with his intimations of the transmigration of the soul and his explicit recognition of  a universal "home" in the Godhead.

William Wordsworth

“ … Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

(William Wordsworth, from his poem, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

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ONLY BREATH

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

From the Ground, nor natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an enemy in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is pathless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath, breathing human being.

    << >>                                            

There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes.

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," p. 34.]

What Will Be When Ages Cease?

What will be when the moon
no longer pulls the tides,
when the sun rises in the north,
when ages cease?


What will be when man is no more,
when the land is sere,
when the air is foul, the sea inert,
when ages cease?


What will be when knowledge is lost,
when information loses all form,
when history ends,
when ages cease?


What will be when consciousness itself wanes,
when the night sky is stripped bare
by the motion of time's inexorable passage,
when ages cease?

What will be when suns cease birthing,
when galaxies dissipate,
when the universe goes dim,
when ages cease?


What will be when everything goes absolutely cold,
when light itself is snuffed out,
when even change becomes unchanging,
when ages cease?

The Evolutionary Clock Is Running Down

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up recreating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

In an interview shortly before his death in 1961, the great psychologist, Carl Jung, made the prescient observation that "we are the origin of all coming evil." Fifty years later, with the Earth's atmosphere warming and amidst widespread hunger, poverty, continuous wars and a massive species extinction event caused by our impact on the planet's ecosystem, we are coming face-to-face with that evil. Can we survive the multiple crises we have brought down upon ourselves? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.

"Crises are often the catalyst for change," observes spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. In the attached video, the enlightened neo-Buddhist points out that the evolutionary clock is running down for mankind as a species, and that there is a spiritual imperative for us to evolve in consciousness before time runs out.

"There is tremendous pressure on humanity - on humanity's consciousness - right now, he observes. "We all feel it. . . . There is tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everybody knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness this opportunity will be missed."

Neti, Neti: Language from Beyond the Self

"The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty - but do we need to be imprisoned by them."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

The great existential battle is to rise above self-consciousness, and to rid our being of the constant, conditioned inner narrative of the ego. It is this undammed "stream of consciousness" that carries us through an entire lifetime unaware that our real being lies beyond words.

 "Neti, neti, neti," goes the Sanskrit chant. "Not this, not this, not this." How, after all, can words possibly describe the ineffable? Spiritual teachers have always taught that the Ultimate is beyond description, and that the incessant voice of the ego is what separates us from the divine. Even when we voice the words in our mind that describe the Ultimate, our words pass like a net through barren waters - catching nothing. "Not this, not this, not this," we realize.

"Knowledge born of the intellect am I not. By nature Truth eternal am I. I am perpetual immutability. Neither formless nor with form, described by the Vedas as "Not this, not this," free from separation and unity, the true Self reigns supreme."

-- Avadhut Gita I:49-50 --

"When the ocean is searching for you," Rumi says, "don't walk to the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an end."

"There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes."

-- "The Essential Rumi" --
(Translations by Coleman Barks)

Religion, Ecumenical Faith and Science: Eastern and Western Perspectives

"Religion must be studied on a broader basis than formerly. All narrow, limited fighting ideas of religion must go. All sect ideas and tribal or national ideas of religion must be given up. That each tribe or nation should have its own particular God, and think that every other is wrong, is a superstition that should belong to the past. All such ideas should be abandoned."

-- Swami Vivikenanda -- 

Written early in the last century, Swami Vivikenanda's advocacy of a universal tolerance for all religions is based on a recognition that, in essence, all religions contain the same impartial truths,  truths that are not inherently conflictive with other faiths or, indeed, with science.

"Religion," Vivkenanda points out, "is the manifestation of Divinity already in man. . . . (and) the proof of one religion depends on the truth of all the rest."

"For instance," he reasons, "if I have six fingers, and no one else has, you may well say that is abnormal. The same reasoning may be applied to the argument that only one religion is true and all others false. One religion only, like one set of six fingers in the world, would be unnatural. We see, therefore, that if one religion is true, all others must be true. There are differences in non-essentials, but in essentials they are all one."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), p. 237.]

In the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, released in 1994, we see a similar, yet guarded, recognition of the ecumenical nature of religion expressed by what has historically been one of the most exclusionary of faiths. After acknowledging the special bonds with both Judaism and Islam, the revised Catechism acknowledges the following:

"The Church's bond with non-Christian religions is in the first place the common origin and end of the human race:

All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. . . .

The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved."

["Catechism of the Catholic Church'" paras. 839-842.]

And what about the relationship between religion and science? "Is religion," Vivikenanda asks, "to justify itself by the discoveries of reason, through which every other concrete science justifies itself? Are the same methods of investigation which we apply to sciences and knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of Religion?"

"In my opinion," Vivikenanda observes, "this must be so, and I am also of (the) opinion that the sooner it is done the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was then all the time useless, unworthy superstition; and the sooner it goes the better. I am thoroughly convinced that its destruction would be the best thing that could happen. All that is dross will be taken off, no doubt, but the essential parts of religion will emerge triumphant out of the investigation. Not only will it be made scientific, as scientific, at least, as any of the conclusions of physics or chemistry, but will have greater strength, because physics or chemistry has no internal mandate to vouch for its truth, which religion has."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), pp. 237-238.]

For his part, roughly 100 years after Vivkenanda's time, Pope Benedict XVI has moved radically towards a resolution and reconciliation of religion and science. In addressing a Vatican conference into the origin of life in the universe (held on October 31, 2008), he made the following comments:

"(Q)uestions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence."

"To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3)."

"To 'evolve' literally means 'to unroll a scroll,' that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."

To reconcile one's religion with all "other" religions is the great task for every individual, while reconciling religion with science is the great task of all religionists and scientists alike.