Preparing for the Miraculous

6: Being Human and the Copernican Principle

Science and Scientism

In the path of the Integral Yoga each person has his or her own way, for the simple reason that in each person the constitutional and incarnational difficulties to become aware of and master vary. Yet the integrality of the Aurobindian Yoga should never be overlooked, however limited and fractional our individual effort still may be. In the attempt at self-perfection based on the combined psychological faculties of the human being – knowledge, devotion or works – each of these faculties can only be neglected at the peril of gross reduction of the integrality, the condition of the intended divine transformation.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often stressed the need for a clear mind and ever expanding knowledge. Sri Aurobindo writes e.g. in The Life Divine: “In any total advance or evolution of the Spirit, not only the intuition, insight, inner sense, the heart’s devotion, a deep and direct life-experience of the things of the Spirit have to be developed, but the intellect also must be enlightened and satisfied, our thinking and reflecting mind must be helped to understand, to form a reasoned and systematized idea of the goal, the method, the principle of this highest development and activity of our nature and the truth of all that lies behind it.” ¹

Science is fundamentally a form of knowledge, it is the mind searching for the Truth behind the workings of Nature. Its importance, combined with the wonders of technology, is evident in the world in which we live. Unfortunately its unprejudiced search for Truth was turned into a dogmatized positivist or materialistic system, for historical reasons which we will see later. The result has been that academic science has divided the integrality of the human experience into two separate spheres: the sphere of the materially perceptible and the sphere of the non-material, at best treated agnostically but more often with supercilious disdain. Science metaphysically dogmatized became Scientism.

The hypothetical gap between science and religion or spirituality turned into a cause of serious tension, for instance during the late Renaissance when Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church. “The Galileo Affair had a catastrophic effect on the Church, putting her in discredit for her inability to accept the development of the sciences. Her condemnation of Galileo remains the big mistake which nothing can efface and makes the Church into an enemy of science for ever.” (Jacques Arsac)² The nineteenth century hardened the standpoint of Scientism while generally weakening religious faith. The polemical tension between both survives in the present, witness the quarrel between Scientism on the one hand and Creationism or Intelligent Design on the other.

Science is now thought by many to be the only source of true knowledge, which should be clear from the fact that it can prove its affirmations mathematically and experimentally, and that it has conquered the Earth. Yet the first affirmation is contradicted by the many discredited scientific theories left by the wayside, and by the recently gained awareness that scientific systems depend on the temporarily dominant paradigm. The second affirmation, that of science’s worldwide triumph, can also be questioned if one realizes how much technology differs from theoretical science, which may lead to the conclusion that the triumph should not be claimed by the theoretical scientist but by the engineer. Although nowadays the two often overlap, science is about abstract knowing, technology about practical making.

Science is also the privileged domain of people with a knack for complicated mathematics and an extensive training in them. This has led to the image of the scientist, more specifically the physicist, as a sort of higher being with an intellect out of the ordinary, who indeed sometimes seeks “to understand the mind of God” (cf. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking). The acceptance of such a view would put science and the crucial decisions made by scientists in our societies beyond the reach of the general public. It would also mean certain defeat for religion and spirituality in any comparison or confrontation with science, for science has the hard arguments at its disposal, while religion and spirituality seem to reason in the clouds or apparently have to resort to wondrous, improbable experiences.

It is, moreover, from their high perch and relying on their mathematical training that some scientists perorate about matters outside their formulas or laboratories, matters about which they know just as much or as little as anybody else. In other words, their scientific training does not substantiate their ideas about psychology, religion or spirituality. Thinking that they are putting down the “mysticism, superstitions and hallucinations” of religion and spirituality, they are in fact depreciating their own search for Truth which, if it exists, is One, approached in whatever way. The West, because of its centuries old Judeo-Christian tradition, is only familiar with religion as a matter of knowledge and prayer, and with a God outside his creation. The scientists and science writers who have any notion of a divine Presence within, and of a possible identification with this Presence, are still exceptions.

Sri Aurobindo’s appreciation of science:

“But, first, it is well that we should recognize the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity.” ³

“The scientist is man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis, and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human being is part of the knowledge necessary for transcending them.” ⁴

“Three things will remain from the labour of the secularist centuries: truth of the physical world and its importance, the scientific method of knowledge – which is to induce Nature and Being to reveal their own way of being and proceeding … – and last, though very far from least, the truth and importance of the earth life and the human endeavour, its evolutionary meaning.” ⁵

La nuova scienza

As mentioned in passing above, an integral and usually overlooked factor in the thinking of modern science is its Judeo-Christian background. The science of the so-called Hellenistic period in Greece and Alexandria had reached a high level of development with figures of genius like Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus of Samos, Hipparchus and Ptolemy. Marvin Minsky regrets the course history has taken, for he is of the opinion that science could now already have been much more advanced “if its progress had not succumbed to the spread of monotheistic religions. As early as 250 BC, Archimedes was well on the way toward modern physics and calculus. So, in an alternate version of history (in which the pursuits of science did not decline), just a few more centuries could have allowed the likes of Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, and Pasteur to anticipate our present state of knowledge about physics, mathematics, and biology.” ⁶

Out of the originally quite diverse Christian movement grew a structured and authoritarian Catholic Church which became, from about 400 CE, the official religion of the Roman Empire. This organization, because of its hierarchical structure and its faith, survived the collapse of the Empire and became the dominant institution in the Middle Ages. Its holy book, the Bible, was supposed to be the Word of God and therefore indubitable truth, together with its interpretations by the Church Fathers. What remained of the former Greek and Roman culture was used as a source of reference, integrated to a certain degree into the belief system of the Church. Any culture has its myths, legends and explanations which support and give meaning to its life. The myths and legends of the Old and New Testament became the mental baggage and source of reference of Western thought, which is still heavily influenced by them even today.

However, for the Catholic Church too, as for all life and its manifestations on Earth, the time arrived that its hierarchical structure and authority began to falter. This period of questioning, roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, we call the Renaissance, synonymous with the urge of rediscovery and exploration in matters intellectual and artistic as well as physical. New continents on the globe were discovered, and so were new realms of the mind. What existed on Earth was so much more, and apparently equally worthy and humane, than the limited world which until then had been thought the only civilized one. A new spirit of astonishment, exaltation and daring led to the nuova scienza, a new science eagerly connecting with the forgotten or forbidden knowledge of the ancients, but also with previously discarded occult practices and wisdom traditions.

The stuff of ancient Hebrew tribes and of the alleged reminiscences about Christ and primitive Christianity was now put to the test of reason and found for the most part to be invention, superstition, fabulation, and sometimes outright errors or lies. Intellectuals invested themselves with the right of scepticism and dared to exert it publicly and in their writings, even at the risk of their possessions, their career, or their lives. The Enlightenment was a period of heroism, fully aware that the negation of an old intellectual and religious paradigm and the construction of a new one would result in revolt as the precondition of a new world. Few people of the present day realize how much they owe to the activist thinkers of centuries not that long past.

It was against this 17th century background that the scientific revolution took place. The principles then formulated by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and a host of less well-known “natural philosophers,” are still the pillars supporting positivist or materialistic science today. All can be found, worded in various ways, in the works of Galileo⁷, the Catholic scientist to whom they were the keys to decipher the book of Nature.

1. Science must be about matter.

This tenet is nowadays so self-evident that one hardly finds it mentioned any more in writings on science. Yet at the time it was a hard-won rule which created a split between things material and non-material. Then the prevalent view was still that of the Chain of Being, the hierarchical ladder of (in ascending order) matter, the life force, mental consciousness, and the spirit. The new, materialistic statement directly implicated the definition and interpretation of Reality, and therefore of God. It was one of the main causes in the attitude of the Church towards the “new science” of which Galileo was seen as the harbinger and figurehead. The sole validation of matter or, in other words, of that which could be perceived by the senses, would gradually lead to distrust and doubt of the non-material, of religion (more specifically Catholic authoritarianism), and ultimately of God. The principle of the sole validity of matter is still the cause of widespread dispute among philosophers, theologians, and people living the spiritual life.

2. Science has no grasp of wholes, but reduces all things to parts consisting of smaller parts consisting of still smaller parts.

This is called reductionism. The reason of its central utility in science is, again, that science is an activity of the mind, and that the mind cannot handle wholes. Sri Aurobindo has explained this aspect of the mind quite clearly on many occasions. Its way of functioning is analytic or dividing (i.e. reductionist) because “it can only know by separation and distinction, and has at the most a vague and secondary apprehension of unity and infinity – for though it can synthesize its divisions, it cannot arrive at a true totality.” ⁸ Nonetheless the biologist Richard Lewontin warns: “Whatever the faults of reductionism, we have accomplished a great deal by employing reductionism as a methodological strategy.” It is, after all, reductionist science that has made our modern world. Yet the increasing awareness that we need much more comprehensive [i.e. holistic] and much less reductionist understanding may be a sign of “a new sort of science that is being forged at the moment.”

3. All changes in matter are brought about by external forces.

This excludes any kind of internal movement or life. The history of the formulation of the laws of motion is fascinating, if only because of the difficulties Galileo and his predecessors had to reckon with. The principle of the external forces is closely connected with the principle of the exclusivity of matter. Here again a drastic cut is made between matter and everything else. The reason seems to be the physiological restrictions of the evolutionary human being, who can only measure things perceived by the senses. The phenomena of life are obvious but for the most part indefinable, and this goes still more for the phenomena of the mind and the spirit. The result will be that living beings are studied as complex compounds of material elements, and that the mind will be declared a function of a material brain. Any time scientific materialists tackle matters of the spirit with the concepts and instruments of their science, they venture beyond their ken and produce for the most part nonsense.

4. Science can only work with the “primary” qualities of things: extension, motion, and mass. “Secondary” qualities, like colour, scent or taste, are effects of the primary qualities.

This principle illustrates clearly how the scientific method – by which is mostly understood the method of physics – reduces the world to a kind of abstract rendition of its real appearance, a black-and-white version of the fantastic diversity it really shows. Here again a reduction is made to what is measurable and quantifiable, in other words usable in the composition of mathematical formulae.

5. The language of science is mathematics, based on measurement.

According to this principle what cannot be measured cannot be known exactly. However, each measurement is the application of a theoretical mindset, as is the registration of each fact. Consequently, the way Reality is seen by scientific materialism is the outcome of a complex prejudice originated within the framework of a scientific theory – a temporarily accepted consensus now called “paradigm.” Where once (around the year 1900) the science of physics was assumed to be complete, without anything basically new to be expected, the growing awareness of the relative value of any theory of physics has changed that outlook completely, and led to the realization that the science of tomorrow may be quite different from the science of today.

6. In science all guesses, hypotheses or theories have to be tested as to their truth and validity.

This was the principle of the unconditional necessity of the experiment which has remained and will remain forever valid. The need of the experiment was the direct consequence of the doubt of any affirmations by any authority, until the Renaissance so docilely accepted in all places of learning and teaching. The “natural philosopher” (as Isaac Newton still called himself) became an experimenter who communicated the results of his findings to other experimenters; they, in their turn, could then examine and try to repeat them. The experiment is at the heart of the “scientific method.” It was the experiment, supported by novel scientific instruments, that opened a whole new world first in cosmology and physics, then in biology.

The intellectual adventure of the Renaissance evolving into the Enlightenment, also called “the Age of Reason,” is one of the great episodes in the history of a part of humanity, Western Europe, which would become of importance to the whole of it. It was a struggle to bring life in phase with reality, more particularly material reality, this against a religious worldview which disdained life on Earth and supported its dogmatic affirmations with a literature from bygone times, outmoded despite being declared the eternal Word of God. It seems rather paradoxical that the Bible throughout the history of Christianity remained intertwined with the “heathen” literature and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance brought these classical treasures to the fore again, and the Enlightenment would rely on them as the basis for its humanistic outlook on life.

The radical materialism of some Enlightenment philosophers, added to the general attitude of pragmatism and scepticism – the right to question anything now declared to be the birthright of any human – led inevitably to the decline of the angry and vengeful God of the Hebrews, whom Christ’s Father of Love had not succeeded in replacing. Moreover, experts now investigated the text of the Bible with the same objectivity as they examined any other text, and found numerous surprisingly human features in the “Word of God.” This, and the increasing resistance against the very human and corrupt mammoth institution that was the Catholic Church, led in the 19th century to “God’s funeral,” the title of a book by A.N. Wilson in which he writes: “It seemed as if there were no good arguments left for religion. If, either for emotional reasons or because you believed in religion as a socially conservative cement, you wished to preserve the forms, you could only do so at the expense of the intellect.” ⁹

In the present era of “postmodern” confusion, according to the Aurobindian view not the symptom of decadence but the sign of transition and rebirth, most of these problems and unresolved tensions between science, religion and spirituality remain not only alive, they also spread, carried by the necessity of scientific education or training, throughout our technological world. In this situation the words of George Tyrell are worth remembering: “One has to pass through atheism to faith; the old God must be pulverized and forgotten before the new can reveal himself to us.” ¹⁰

“Knocking Man off his Pedestal”

In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, in his Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium published when on his deathbed, showed mathematically that the Earth orbiting around the Sun was a more correct proposition than the Sun orbiting around the Earth. As at that time the general belief was that the Earth was the centre of the cosmos, a belief that was an article of faith, Copernicus’ demonstration came as a severe shock, for if it proved to be true Earth would lose its privileged position in God’s creation, of which the Human would no longer be the king.

Especially the Catholic Church, appointed custodian by Jesus Christ of everything true, reacted vehemently to defend verities contained in the books of the Ancient Testament. Did one not read there: “On that day when the Lord delivered the Amorites into the hands of Israel, Joshua spoke with the Lord, and he said in the presence of Israel: ‘Stand Still, O Sun, over Gideon, and Moon, you also, over the Valley of Aijalon.’ And the Sun stood still and the Moon halted, till the people had vengeance on their enemies.” Was this not sufficient proof for all believers that it was the Sun that was moving, not the Earth? And could not anybody see this on any day with his own eyes?

Nevertheless, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic system had to make place for the Copernican, but only after much conflict and confrontation, the best-known episode of which is Galileo’s trial and condemnation by the Inquisition. In the long run science triumphed over superstition, something Scientism vividly remembers and keeps reminding humanity of. For what it calls “the Copernican Principle” means that, as in nature there are no values, everything consists of the same elementary matter and nothing is more or less, higher or lower than anything else. For this reason the Copernican Principle is also called “the Principle of Mediocrity.”

In a previous talk¹¹ we have already wondered about the strange pleasure some positivist scientists seem to find in denigrating all values and targeting especially humanity for degradation. To quote one example among innumerable ones: the biologist Lynn Margulis writes about “the tenacious illusion of special dispensation” which humanity imagines it possesses, but which “belies its true status as upright mammalian weeds.” “Earth is going to die … the Sun is going to die … the Universe is going to die …” is in our contemporary science literature an often repeated litany of perdition. That this is going to happen in billions of years, while the very first life-forms on Earth are thought to have appeared 3.8 billion years ago, and Homo sapiens only 2 million years ago, is not taken into account. Such pronouncements do indeed substantiate the truth of the Mother’s saying: “Materialism is the gospel of death.” What is the fun a certain breed of scientists may find in divulging a conviction meant to belittle and to hurt, while they should be aware that Science is a matter of process which has no room for metaphysical conclusions?

The New Scientist of 20 December 2008 examined the question: “Who did most to knock man off his pedestal?” Was it the tandem Copernicus-Galileo who removed us from the centre of the universe? Or was it the tandem Linnaeus-Darwin who put an end to the illusion that humans are created in the image of God and placed them among the animals? But then there is also the question: what is a human being, and what kind of human being is Science talking about?

The Copernican Theory

Copernicus’ world and reasoning were much more complex and varied than generally assumed. He was after all a man of the Renaissance trying to make sense of the old and new cultural influences crisscrossing through his time. For the central position of the Sun, for instance, he argued in the following way: “In the middle of everything stands the Sun. For in this most beautiful temple who could place this lamp in any other better place than one from which it can illuminate all other things at the same time? This Sun some people call appropriately the light of the World, others its Soul or Ruler. [Hermes] Trismegistos calls it the Visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls it the All-Seeing. Thus the Sun, sitting on its Royal Throne, guides the revolving family of the stars.” ¹² The mentality of Nicolaus Copernicus seems to have been rather different from the gross materialistic evaluation of nature which uses his name in the formulation of the Copernican Principle.

What is more, Copernicus, as often thought, did not reduce the Ptolemaic number of circles required to make the solar system go round, he increased it from forty to forty-eight, as painstakingly counted by Arthur Koestler in Sleepwalkers. And Copernicus stuck to the inviolability of the circle, since classical times the paragon of heavenly perfection and the reason why Copernicus still needed so many cycles and epicycles to make his model fit the data of observation. Therefore, “when we talk today about ‘the Copernican system’ we usually mean a system of the universe quite different from that described in Copernicus’ De revolutionibus … It should be more properly be called ‘Keplerian’ or at least ‘Keplero-Copernican’ … It has been well said that the significance of Copernicus lay not so much in the system he propounded as in the fact that the system he did propound would ignite the great revolution in physics that we associate with the names of Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. The so-called Copernican revolution was really a later revolution of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.” ¹³ In fact, Galileo’s “spyglass” or “optick tube” did more for the acceptance of the heliocentric system than Copernicus’ famous book.

It may therefore be concluded that the Copernican Principle or the Principle of Mediocrity could never have been devised by Copernicus himself nor by one of his contemporaries. It is a weapon in the arsenal of Scientism forged during the decline of Western religion and the ascendancy of positivist science. Bertrand Russell, formerly the mouthpiece of anti-religious rationalism, defined the Principle as follows: “The earth is one of the smaller planets of a not particularly important star, a very minor portion of the Milky Way which is one of a very large number of galaxies; and altogether the idea that we who crawl about on this little planet are really the centre of the universe is one which I don’t think would occur to anybody except us.” ¹⁴ Here Russell was speaking about a universe with a very large number of galaxies of which Copernicus could not have had an idea – and Russell himself would probably wonder at the cosmological marvels and riddles that have been discovered since he made his voice heard.

The picture of the cosmos has changed in amazing ways since Aristotle, then Ptolemy, then Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, then Einstein, and it is changing today with the powerful telescopes on and above earth. Another question altogether is whether all this has taken the human being out of the centre of the universe. If the humans were only material things on planet earth, one could say yes. But as they are mental and spiritual beings, they will always perceive “the world,” including its picture as developed by Science, from the centre that they are themselves.

The Naked Ape

Was it Charles Darwin, more than Nicolaus Copernicus, who knocked man from his pedestal? In the public mind nowadays Charles Darwin is the giant who thought out the theory of evolution and thereby initiated a radical shift in the conception humans had of themselves. This, like so much else in popular science, is a misconception. It might be said that Darwin was the midwife who, in 1859, presented the theory of evolution to the world, or that he was the cause that all of a sudden the evolution theory became the focus of attention and consternation. For how to admit that among our ancestors and those of Christ there had been a monkey?

In the first half of the 19th century theories of evolution were in the air. What was more, the great French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had formulated one that was fully worked out and coherent, although not fully justified – which was not possible with the means at the disposal of biologists at the time (and even now). Secondly, Darwin’s own theory was far from fully justified scientifically. He never touched on the origin of species, even though so proclaiming in the title of On the Origin of Species, could only sketch the formation of species by natural selection, and had not a clue about the inheritance of the natural characteristics in animals, now called genetics.

Darwin was also a recluse who did not undertake any long-distance travels after his adventurous five-year voyage on the Beagle. The ones who did campaign to spread his ideas were his friends and admirers, most of them ardent freethinkers with T.H. Huxley as their ringmaster. They enjoyed shocking the prim moralistic Victorian society of their time with the new message: that all living beings consisted of nothing but matter, should be studied in the way physics studied material things, and that in the course of the evolution everything had always developed from a previous material something, like the primates from the monkeys and consequently the humans from the primates. The human became nothing but an animal, an evolved “naked ape” living in a society which was a “human zoo” (titles of books by Desmond Morris).

The human media repeat day by day how animal-like humans are, and those animalized humans, on an average, seem to care little about it. If scientists say so, it must be true. Besides, who still cares about values, metaphysics, or – God forbid! – “mysticism”? The late Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist and science writer of world-fame, was one of the chief propagators of the idea that human beings were a fluke, not an inevitable outcome of increasing mammal intelligence. He wrote for instance that, if Pikaia had not survived, we would not have been here. Pikaia, an animal from the Cambrian era, was a soft-bodied darting swimmer, now thought to be the ultimate grandparent of all vertebrate animals. But if any other strategic link in the evolutionary chain had not been there before or after Pikaia, we would not have been here either!

Gould: “We are here because an odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age¹⁵; because a small and tenuous species [Homo sapiens], arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer – but none exists.” And Richard Dawkins, whose name is now often associated in importance with the name of Darwin, wrote in The Selfish Gene: “The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. … We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator – molecules called DNA.”

It is now increasingly recognized that the past of the terrestrial evolution has been a concatenation of huge catastrophes and extinctions, but also that after each of those catastrophes life made a step forward, as if the ordeal had been a precondition for its growth. “The evolution of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its inherent and native powers emerging little by little,” wrote Sri Aurobindo already in The Life Divine. “Further, the facts of animal life and the operations of the emergent mind in life impose on us the conclusion that there is in this concealed consciousness an underlying Knowledge or power of knowledge which by the necessity of the life-contacts with the environment comes to the surface.” ¹⁶ To be able to accept such a conclusion, however, one must have an open, plastic mind, not a mind brainwashed by authority, professional (de)formation or historical formulation of any kind, even scientific. For if the search for knowledge and truth is ineradicable from the human mind, its findings have without exception been proven to be partial or provisional.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

A third, less often noted argument in the negative view propagated by Scientism is the second law of thermodynamics, the study of the transformations of energy. The first law of thermodynamics is the law of conservation of energy. Its second law is the law of increase of entropy or molecular disorder, which states that, over time, closed systems tend toward greater states of disorder. This increase in entropy must, in the opinion of positivist science, inevitably lead to universal degradation.

“The secrets of evolution,” which are the secrets of life, “are time and death,” wrote Carl Sagan. (Once again we are reminded of the Mother’s saying that materialism is the gospel of death.) The Earth, the Sun, our galaxy, the billions of galaxies of our universe: all that is not living but dying. “Indeed, life is about half over. Our estimates are that the first living organisms appeared on earth in the order of 3 to 4 billion years ago, and we know from stellar evolution that our Sun will expand and burn up the Earth in another 3 to 4 billion years, putting an end to everything,” writes Richard Lewontin. George Smoot is even more explicit: “Coraggio, domani sará peggio! (Be courageous, tomorrow will be worse!) … The long-term future is bleak: entropy will continue to increase … Every physical process in the universe follows the second law of thermodynamics … We face a continuous downward spiral of no return.” Entropy is unforgiving. “Many scientists look worried these days … To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.” ¹⁷ (William Calvin)

However, the consequences of the second law are valid and verifiable only in case of the evolution of a system that is energetically isolated, in other words: closed. Biological systems are not closed. And is the universe a closed system? … “When the laws of thermodynamics are applied to living organisms there seems to be a problem,” writes Paul Davies. “One of the basic properties of life is its high degree of order, so when an organism develops or reproduces, the order increases. This is the opposite of the second law’s bidding. The growth of an embryo, the formation of a DNA molecule, the appearance of a new species and the increasing elaboration of the biosphere as a whole are all examples of an increase of order and a decrease of entropy.” ¹⁸ “The famous law of increase of entropy describes the world as evolving from order to disorder; still, biological or social evolution shows us the complex emerging from the simple. How is this possible? How can structure arise from disorder? … There is an obvious contradiction between the static view of dynamics and the evolutionary paradigm of thermodynamics.” ¹⁹ (Ilya Prigogine )

In one of his first though least known books, Quantum Questions, Ken Wilber examines the metaphysics of the 20th century physicists, quoting some of them extensively. His conclusion is clear and convincing. The physicists who worked out the two great revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics – Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Eddington, and others – were also profound philosophers and even, Wilber writes, mystics. The reason was that they felt themselves confronted with the essence of things, with Reality as such and with everything Reality may stand for. For some three decades they were rethinking the foundations of existence, and although their vantage point was that of scientific materialism, they were capable of expanding their horizon sufficiently to encompass the big questions within it, even those beyond Judeo-Christianity.

The great theoretical physicists of the following generation – Dirac, Feynman, Weinberg, Hawking – were very differently focused (at least most of them). To them the big questions led to nothing but confrontational and useless verbiage; what counted was to solve the mathematical problems posed by the accepted paradigms. The rest one could speculate or joke about, but it could only be meaningfully approached after the bases of physics (fundamentally the Grand Unified Theory) would be found. As they saw it, everything had come about by the universal laws and constants, obeying Chance. The following are two examples of this mentality. Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … The effect to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.” ²⁰ Peter Atkins: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root there is only corruption and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.” ²¹

The biologists, eager to insert the various branches of their science within the framework of physics, have adopted this view with a vengeance. “If the human accepts this message of science [actually of Scientism] in its full meaning, then he must wake up from his dream lasting thousands of years to discover his total solitude, his radical foreignness. He knows now that, like a Gypsy, his place is in the margin of the universe where he has to live – in a universe deaf to his music, indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and crimes.” ²² This is a paragraph from Jacques Monod’s famous Chance and Necessity, called “a book of desperate metaphysics.”

The way scientists like Stephen Hawking have become superstars, whose slightest pronouncements are regurgitated by the media ad nauseam, is pathetic. About Hawking’s latest bestseller, The Grand Design, one finds in Scientific American of November 2010: “Physics, the book states, can now explain where the universe came from and why the laws of nature are what they are. The universe arose ‘from nothing’ courtesy of the force of gravity, and the laws of nature are an accident of the particular slice of universe we happen to inhabit. ‘God may exist’, Hawking told Larry King, adding, ‘but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.’”

Paul Davies has put it all together: “There is a sizeable group of scientists who … wish to diminish or even besmirch human significance, and with it the significance of human qualities such as intelligence and understanding. For these scientists any suggestion of a teleological trend or progressive evolution towards consciousness, or even towards greater complexity, is anathema. Their arguments, however, also carry barely concealed overtones of an ideological agenda [Scientism]. In this respect they are little different from those who have decided in advance on this or that religious interpretation of nature, and then shoehorn the scientific facts to fit their preconceived beliefs. Meanwhile, it has to be admitted, most scientists stick with something like position A [the absurd universe] and get on with their work, leaving the big questions to philosophers and priests.” ²³

Two Notes in the Margin

In conclusion of this section, the following notes may throw a special light on its contents.

What Was the Real Centre of the Universe?

In his classic work The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy has the following remark: “The geocentric cosmography served rather for man’s humiliation than for his exaltation, and Copernicanism was opposed partly on the ground that it assigned too dignified and lofty a position to his dwelling-place … The centre of the world was not a place of honour; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank. The actual centre, indeed, was Hell; in the spatial sense the medieval world was literally diabolocentric.” Though surprising, this is logical because hell, the abyss or bottomless pit, was always felt to be located below the earthly life. And Lovejoy quotes John Wilkins, who wrote in 1640 about “the vileness of our earth, because it consists of a more sordid and base matter than any other part of the world; and therefore must be situated in the centre, which is the worst place, and at the greatest distance from those purer incorruptible bodies, the heavens.” ²⁴

Galileo Galilei seems at one time to have been of the same opinion, if only for matters of expediency. “Galileo circulated La Bilancetta in manuscript form and it became a success. It established him as a mathematician to be reckoned with. The academic establishment welcomed him with open arms, and asked him to apply his mathematical ability to what was to them a far more important problem: the calculation of the exact location and dimensions of Hell, as described in Dante’s Inferno. Galileo took his assigned task seriously … Over the course of two lectures to the Florentine Academy he used mathematical arguments to demonstrate that Hell must have a shape like a cone, with the point at the centre of the earth and the circular boundary of the surface passing through Jerusalem. … His argument convinced the aristocratic audience, and he was rewarded with a lectureship in mathematics at the University of Pisa, where he soon realized that he had got the mathematics of Hell badly wrong.” (Len Fisher )²⁵

Earth Special

As we have seen, it is the main tenet of the Copernican Principle that there is nothing special or privileged about our location in the universe. The spiritual view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother says exactly the opposite, as has been considered in another talk.²⁶ In the present context the following quotations must suffice.

The Mother: “In the immensity of the astronomical skies, earth is a thing absolutely without interest and without importance, but from the occult and spiritual point of view, earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. … For the convenience and necessity of the work, the whole universe has been concentrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand which is called the earth. And therefore it is the symbol of all: all that is to be changed, all that is to be transformed, all that is to be converted is here. This means that if one concentrates on this work and does it here, all the rest will follow automatically.” ²⁷

Sri Aurobindo: “Earth is the foundation and all the worlds are on the earth and to imagine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some other world, the divine realization must come.”

“Evolution takes place on earth and therefore the earth is the proper field for progress.” ²⁸

The Mother’s strong statement speaks volumes: La terre, on ne la détruit pas ! – the Earth will not be destroyed!

What is a Human Being?

Scientific materialism reduced the human being to a complex chance agglomeration of material elements, emerging as forms in a coincidental evolution. The image it found pleasure in destroying in the Western mind was that of an original human being given form by a Creator in his own image from the dust of the Earth. This is one of the numerous mythical stories about the origin of man. In this case the image after which he was made must have been that of an anthropomorphic God, in other words a God himself made in the image of man!

Still there is a truth behind this myth.²⁹ When writing about the four varnas – brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras – Sri Aurobindo mentioned the Purushasukta of the Vedas “where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet.” To us, he comments, this is merely a poetical image, but to the seers among the ancient forefathers it was “a revelative symbol of the unrevealed … To them this symbol of the Creator’s body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha … Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expression of the same hidden reality.” ³⁰

What Sri Aurobindo calls here “the cosmic Purusha” was also known in various ancient occult traditions. Gnosticism knew an Anthropos, Protanthropos, Adam or Adamas. The Kabbalah knew Adam Kadmon, the Primal or Primordial Man, sometimes also called the High Man or the Heavenly Man. Whatever the names given, all could be considered to be the same divine archetype from whose supernatural body the manifestation, the macrocosm, continuously came forth, as well as the human being in his structural complexity, the microcosm. It is because of the existence of this archetype that life in the evolution has gradually taken on the shape which, for the time being, culminates in the human body. Far from being a gratuitous outgrowth somewhere in the universe, the evolution is a process of Consciousness and has an aim, directed or projected by the cosmic Purusha. This Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental Being. Everything in existence is supported by it, guided by it, and will ultimately be fulfilled by it.

According to Sri Aurobindo the human is “the mental being” who appeared on earth at a certain moment in its evolution. In the popular mind man, as Darwin said, is still a descendant of the ape, but today paleoanthropology could neither tell you which ape nor when the event took place. Sri Aurobindo had already written in the Arya: “With regard to man especially there is still an enormous uncertainty as to how he, so like and yet so different from the other sons of Nature, came into existence.” ³¹ One finds this now confirmed in some of the most recent publications by experts in this matter, e.g. Friedemann Schrenk in Die Frühzeit des Menschen [the early times of the human being], and Pascal Picq in Les origines de l’homme [the origins of the human being]. Schrenk writes: “The origin of the species Homo is one of the most controversial problems in paleoanthropology, despite or because of all the new [fossil] finds.” And Picq: “The human does not descend from the chimpanzee or the bonobo, nor the other way around. If we share that many common characteristics, it is because they have been transmitted to us by a common ancestor who lived in Africa some 7 million years ago.” That ancestor remains unknown.

Most important in this context is the Aurobindian view of what one might call “the double movement” in evolution. The manifestation is the result of a plunge by the Divine into his contrary, thereby creating the glorious scale of the worlds, from the highest expressions of the divine Consciousness to the lowest, those of the Inconscient. Thus was established “the Chain of Being:” in descending order spirit, mind, the life forces, and matter. In its urge to regain the divine Origin, the evolution is the slow re-conquest of the original and central Consciousness, ascending the existing scale step by step. The downward movement Sri Aurobindo has called “involution” and the upward movement “evolution.” To accede to a new, higher step in the evolution a double movement is needed: the inner urge on the existing level, obeying the evolutionary aim of re-conquest, and an answer from the corresponding higher step in the involution. What is here summarized in an abstract way means that, in order to realize the urge in Nature to exceed the level of the primates, a response from the worlds of the mind was needed, and not only an answer but a participation, an incarnation of the mental life in the life of the primates. The human is that being that has in him the mental characteristics from the worlds of the mind incarnated in the material unfolding of the terrestrial evolution.

Human beings are the sons and daughters of Mother Earth. As such they carry in them the evolutionary gradations of their formation – matter, the life forces, mind. Because these evolutionary gradations correspond to the cosmic gradations, the human being is rightly called a “microcosm.” The gradations are concretely expressed in what yogic experience has called the “chakras,” lined up in the subtle body along the backbone. Through the chakras, the human being is tuned to the universal forces, even though unaware of it. “All the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside.” ³² (Sri Aurobindo)

So what is a human being? Present-day scientific materialism assures us that “there is no reason to single out the human line [in the evolution] as special, except for our chauvinistic interest in it. … There is no way in which we can claim to be ‘better’ than Aegyptopithecus [an early monkey] or the Miocene apes, only different. They were well adapted to the world in which they lived, and we are well suited to the world in which we live.” ³³ (Mary and John Gribbin)

The great Persian mystical poet, Rumi, saw the human otherwise – but that was still in what the West calls its “Dark Ages:”

First man appeared in the class of inorganic things,
Next he passed there from into that of plants.

For ages he lived as one of the plants,
Remembering naught of his inorganic state so different;
And when he passed from the vegetative to the animal state
He had no remembrance of his state as a plant …

Again, the great Creator, as you know,
Drew man out of the animal into the human state.

Thus man passed from one order of nature to another,
Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now.

Of his first souls he has now no remembrance,
And he will be again changed from his present soul …³⁴

In the Western “Age of Reason,” Alexander Pope wrote in his famous Essay on Man (1733):

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast …

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey of all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

In the spiritual view, now as well as in the past, the human being is an incarnated soul, in other words the Divine incarnated to fulfil His purposes on Earth. This has always been sensed and even concretely experienced by people in all climes called seers, great souls, yogis or mystics, even when their mentality was restricted by the knowledge and thought patterns proper to their ages. Now the times seem to have ripened and may bear fruit in the realization by mature souls of their presence in this material world, transformed by a higher Consciousness. The “anthropocentric illusion” will then be changed into a divine Reality. Which is why Sri Aurobindo had Narad say to Savitri’s royal father:

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield …

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.³⁵

“This alone [the realization of the Divine] is man’s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.” ³⁶