Preparing for the Miraculous

9: Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang

Whatever India has to offer should be stated to the West in language that the West can understand.

Sri Aurobindo¹

Rationality is a specific function of the human being, so often called “the mental being” by Sri Aurobindo. There is no doubt that his view was the most encompassing ever, which is the reason why words like “integral” and “synthetic” are keywords in it. His affirmation was “a catholic affirmation,” his faith “a faith which the highest Reason, the widest and most patient reflection do not deny, but rather affirm.” ² It may therefore be said that Sri Aurobindo’s teaching is the most rational, for it expounds an integration or synthesis of all material and spiritual knowledge from the past and the present, and an open attitude to embrace and find a place for everything. Because all is That. In the practice of the Yoga one has to be one-pointed in one’s heart, but in one’s mind, as a human incarnation in the present time, one has to be open and wide-ranging, therein following the example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

“We have to find a truth that can entirely reconcile Spirit and Matter and can give to both their due portion in Life and their due justification in Thought, amercing neither of its rights, denying in neither the sovereign truth from which even its errors, even the exclusiveness of its exaggerations draw so constant a strength. For wherever there is an extreme statement [like the tenets of materialistic science] that makes such a powerful appeal to the human mind, we may be sure that we are standing in the presence of no mere error, superstition or hallucination, but of some sovereign fact disguised which demands our fealty and will avenge itself if denied or excluded. … It is therefore through the utmost unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling truth and so at some strongest foundation for a reconciling practice in the inner life of the individual and his outer existence.” ³

True to this attitude, Sri Aurobindo followed with constant interest the goings-on in the world, including the main discoveries in science, where the revolutionary new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were the order of the day. Many statements in his writings show how much he appreciated the efforts of the scientists to understand Nature and to advance a step further towards the Truth. Yet he was also in possession of a spiritual insight and knowledge which made the limitations of positivist science – a science of process, not of essentials or Reality – crystal clear.

About the theory of evolution, for instance, he wrote: “A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” ⁴

What was to Sri Aurobindo self-evident fact of spiritual knowledge, here brought to bear on the biological theory of evolution, may be equally well applied to other branches of science. Indeed, Sri Aurobindo’s writings are strewn with direct or indirect reflections on science and spirituality, and with comparisons between them. As these remarks are often made in passing, they may escape the attention of the reader. In this talk we will consider one such passage in Savitri, a few lines which contain a wealth of meaning.

The Big Bang

Two months before he descended into death, Sri Aurobindo seemed in a hurry to finish “his real work,” this to the astonishment of Nirodbaran, his amanuensis, who writes in his memoirs that he had never seen Sri Aurobindo hurry for anything. By his “real work” Sri Aurobindo meant Savitri, the epic which he had been rewriting and expanding for decades. If anything, Sri Aurobindo’s concern shows the importance attached by him to this major opus of his later years. In it he laid down the essence not only of his own knowledge and experience but also of the experience of the Mother, as she has said herself. We can find her supreme praise for Savitri in a conversation which Mona Sarkar, then a young sadhak, has published under the title Sweet Mother – Harmonies of Light. There is no doubt that Sri Aurobindo, who had written The Poetry of the Future, conceived Savitri as his poetry of the future, a poetry of Truth in the age-old tradition of the truth-seers, the rishis, who formulated the mantric lines of the Veda and the Upanishads. Putting it all together, one might call Savitri Sri Aurobindo’s testament.

As the Mother said in the aforementioned conversation, Sri Aurobindo shows us in Savitri the main structure and the sense of the divine manifestation which we call the universe, mantrically formulated from the largest spiritual knowledge and perception ever possessed by an incarnated being. We find in the epic a description of the universe and its origin, the gradations or worlds of involution and evolution, the beings of those worlds, the evolution of life on Earth, the past, present and future of the human being in its changing environments, life and death, the aspects and relation of Spirit and Matter, the meaning of it all and the ways of the Divine with it. And much more. Many statements refer directly to science in a positive or negative way. As Sri Aurobindo wrote for the future, this cannot but have been intentionally. It is the aim of this talk to examine one such statement:

A Mystery’s process is the universe.

At first was laid a strange and anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term,
An eternal negative, a matrix Nought:
Into its forms the Child is ever born
Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.

A slow reversal’s movement then took place:
A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,
Of its dense rings were formed these million stars …⁵

In these lines Sri Aurobindo describes the origin of the universe, with in the last two his evocation of what is now commonly called the “Big Bang.” It should be kept in mind that this was written before 1950.

All peoples known in history – and most probably all others also – have wondered about how the world in which they lived originated. There were the seasons which regulated their lives, the unknown beyond the horizon which encircled their lives, the immense cupola of the sky along which the sun and moon travelled and where the stars shone bright at night, and the miracles of birth, life and death. Each people has its own story about the beginnings, told from generation to generation, with gods, giants and primeval beings doing amazing deeds. However, there are no known stories in which the cosmos began at one time, at one point – humanity, yes, successive humanities, yes, but never the existence of the world. The inexplicable was mostly explained by imagining cycles of immense duration, improving or worsening the lot of the creatures of the gods, and sometimes of the gods themselves. With one exception: the Hebrews. Their holy book told about an absolute beginning, when Yahweh created heaven and earth, and everything in it. According to Genesis, the book in which this is narrated, the world had a beginning.

Physics and cosmology, successful in working out several theories of cosmological mechanics, preferred at first not to trouble itself with an explanation of how the cosmic clockwork had been wound up. They supposed, for simplicity’s sake, that the universe had existed from infinity and would continue existing in infinity, eternal and unchanging. Yet this opportunistic viewpoint began to be questioned in the 1920s. Because of the advances in nuclear physics, the composition and the life histories of the various types of stars began to be known. Edwin Hubble’s astonishing discoveries seemed to show that the universe was expanding. All this lead to a model of the universe which is still presented in the text books and by the media as the standard model (but which is in fact severely questioned).

“We can say that the Big Bang theory is currently regarded as a well-established theory, the standard-model acceptable to most physicists, and that the questions that remain do not cast serious suspicions on it.” Thus wrote Kitty Ferguson in The Fire in the Equations, published in 1994.⁶ Lee Smolin, however, opines: “We, who are used to the idea now, can only speculate about how hard it was to accept the notion that the universe might have had a beginning.” ⁷ Indeed, in 1933 the universe was still assumed to be eternal and unchanging, and when Albert Einstein, then already a celebrity, endorsed the first propositions of something like a Big Bang model, he was vehemently attacked and even ridiculed. (In the history of science, there has never been a new proposition which was not attacked and covered with ridicule.)

Around 1950, in the years Sri Aurobindo wrote the lines quoted from Savitri, the controversy raged between Hoyle, Bondi and Gold’s “Steady State” model of the universe and the theory of the explosion, the Big Bang at the beginning of time. In 1953 the majority of astronomers had not yet accepted the Big Bang model of the universe, and clung to their conservative view of an eternal universe. Throughout the 1950s the scientific community remained divided. In 1959 the Science News-Letter conducted a survey and asked thirty-three prominent astronomers to declare their position on the controversy. “The results showed that eleven experts backed the Big Bang, eight stood by the Steady State model, and the remaining fourteen were either undecided or thought that both models were wrong.” It was only in the 1960s that the Big Bang model became preponderant.⁸ The 1964 discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, and later the mapping of the entire sky by the COBE satellite, were supposed to confirm the theory. Still, in a 1980 poll, 69% of the astronomers supported the Big Bang, only 2% stuck with the Steady State theory, and 29% were unsure.⁹

This means that Sri Aurobindo wrote what he had seen as the truth at a time that science was still far from having converted to the Big Bang, namely that “a gas exploded from an invisible fire,” and that “of its dense rings were formed these million stars” – in other words, that the material universe had begun with an explosion.

According to the current Big Bang theory, the universe originated from something smaller than an atom, even smaller than the nucleus of an atom, labelled a “singularity.” Reducing, in accordance with the laws of physics and cosmology known at present, the expanding universe backwards to its ever smaller past, the theorists have ended with something that was an unknowable, something of which only one instance existed. The astronomically big had, oh wonder, originated from the indefinably small. All had originated from nothing.

This is an example of how science, epitome of the rational and opponent of the mystical, accepts the undefinable, even as a basis of its theoretical constructs. (Another example was Newton’s gravity, exerting a magical action at a distance.) All the same, it must be said that serious science has never been comfortable with the explanation. Extrapolating backwards, from the known to the unknown (from the perceived universe to an inexplicable event 13.7 billion years ago), is a risky and scientifically unjustifiable way of proceeding. This is why string theory and M-theory, much flaunted but as yet little proven, propose several solutions to the problem, accept a universe or universes before and after the Big Bang, and even fantasize about a “multiverse” with an infinite number of dimensions which would explain all things imaginable.

Sri Aurobindo gives the solution of the mysterious and momentous happening at the origin of the universe: a gas belched out from some invisible fire. This places the “singularity” squarely in dimensions which must remain forever foreign to materialistic science, but without which Reality, including material reality, will never be explainable. For the “invisible fire” in question is not what is commonly understood as “fire,” it is Agni, the mystic fire of the Vedas “which is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men and things.” It is the central Fire of Heraclitus, Pythagoras and the Stoics, “the heart of Zeus.” “In the Pythagorean cosmology the centre of the world is occupied by a fire (different from the Sun) around which orbit all the heavenly bodies (including the Sun), and that fire is connected with the godhead, Hestia, responsible for the movement of the world and for its organization. Here the fire occupies a central position and an organizing function …” (André Pichot)¹⁰ Sri Aurobindo, rediscoverer of the secret of the Veda, wrote: “It is a fact that Agni is the basis of forms, as the Sankhya pointed out long ago, i.e. the fiery principle in the three powers radiant, electric and gaseous (the Vedic trinity of Agni) is the agent in producing liquid and solid forms of what is called Matter.” ¹¹

The Quantum Vacuum

Yet all this is a comment on the last two lines of our quotation. The previous lines are as revealing:

A Mystery’s process is the universe.

At first was laid a strange and anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term,
An eternal negative, a matrix Nought …

What Sri Aurobindo mentions here is “a strange and anomalous base” for the event that is to take place: the sudden appearance of a material universe. At the time he wrote this it was thought that nothing could precede the primal explosion. Russell Stannard, for instance, tries to explain: “The Big Bang did not take place at some well-defined point within an already existing space – like a terrorist bomb going off under a car in a particular street in a particular town. Before the Big Bang there was no space. It was the expansion of space itself, from ‘nothing,’ that was responsible for the phenomenon of the expansion of the universe.” ¹² Here Sri Aurobindo names the indescribable making the appearance of matter possible, and in which we can discern two matters of special interest.

The first one is that “a void” had to be created. Metaphysically, the Divine has always been seen as a plenum, an absolute fullness in which there can be no gaps or holes. The Divine is the Infinite that is a Point of absolute density, and a Point that is the Infinite of absolute density. In his non-material manifestation there are no gaps, for a gap or vacuity would mean a flaw in the divine fullness and perfection. Contrary to modern science, which has found that matter is for the most part empty space, in the wisdom traditions the Divine has always been conceived as a total density. Consequently, Arthur Lovejoy writes in his classic work on The Great Chain of Being: “The perfection of the Absolute Being must be an intrinsic attribute, a property inherent in the Idea of it; and since the being and attribute of all other things are derivative from this perfection because they are logically implicit in it, there is no room for any contingency anywhere in the universe.” ¹³

According to Sri Aurobindo “a void” had to be created in the fullness to make place for a material universe. However, this void is not an emptiness or nothing, it is “a cipher of some secret Whole, / Where zero held infinity in its sum / And All and Nothing were a single term.” It may here be recalled that, in another, complementary approach to the creation of matter, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother said that matter is the first produce of the Inconscient, the dark Zero that is the contrary into which the Divine has plunged. At the very beginning of Savitri we read:

A fathomless zero occupied the world.

A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness …

Here is that “zero” again that held infinity in its sum, and which Sri Aurobindo would confirm by asserting that “The Inconscient too is infinite.” ¹⁴

The other matter of special interest is the resemblance of the lines of our quotation with elements of the quantum theory known as “the quantum vacuum.” (It should be stated here explicitly that this comparison is not meant as a scientific explanation intending to show that science proves spirituality. All is That, science too. But spirituality is holistic, based on experience. Science is an activity of the mind, restricting itself to matter as perceived by the senses. Spirituality can know now; to really know, science will have to break through the boundaries of materialism it has imposed on itself, and take up the exploration of the realms of life and mind before it can found a durable knowledge.)

Decades before Sri Aurobindo wrote the quoted passage in Savitri, he had already noted, interpreting the old scriptures: “As in the immobile ether arises, first sign of the creative impulse of Nature, vibration, Shabda, and this vibration is a line of etheric movement, is ether contacting ether in its own field of mobile self-force and that primal stir is sufficient to initiate all forms and forces, even such is the original movement of the Infinite. But the vibration is not the stir of any material force or substance and this contact is not material contact. This is a vibration of consciousness in spiritual essence; this is the contact of consciousness with itself in spiritual substance.” ¹⁵ The language is quite different from the modern scientific terminology. (To Sri Aurobindo ‘ether’ was ‘space’ and may become so again in physics.) But the point is that what at the time was a novel theory in physics is stated as fact in a magnum opus by Sri Aurobindo, intended to contain his spiritual legacy. Moreover, terms like “anomalous base” and “the etheric movement of vibration” bring to mind the quantum theory according to which virtual particles arise continuously out of “the void” and may be at the origin of the universe.

For “one of the more bizarre consequences of quantum uncertainty is that matter can appear out of nowhere … Quantum mechanics permits energy to appear spontaneously from nothing as long as it disappears again rapidly … In fact, the fluctuating quantum energy of the vacuum causes the temporary creation of all manner of ‘virtual’ particles … The apparently inert vacuum is actually a sea of restless activity, full of ghostly particles which appear, interact and vanish.” ¹⁶ (Paul Davies) What we normally regard as empty space is actually an ocean of seething activity. “In this remarkable scenario, the entire cosmos simply comes out of nowhere, completely in accordance with the laws of quantum physics, and creates along the way all the matter and energy needed to build the universe we now see.” ¹⁷ But then the question arises: what produced the quantum forces that made the virtual particles, and consequently the universe, possible? Davies’ “out of nowhere” looks much like “out of nothing.” And as Sri Aurobindo wrote: “A Nothing which is full of all potentialities is the most complete opposition of terms and things possible.” ¹⁸

Is the Big Bang Generally Accepted?

From the popular literature and the media one would gather that the Big Bang, the explosive event at the origin of the universe, is now the consensus in science. In the general mind the mysterious explosion of a nothing that became everything has lost most of its shocking mystery, as scientists assert that they know all about it up to a fraction of time so small that it requires a long chain of zeros to write it out. Yet the scientist Hubert Reeves warned recently: “That the observations support the idea of the Big Bang only means that it is a highly credible theory, not that it is an absolute and definitive truth.” And in a serious popular science magazine like the French Sciences et Avenir one finds headlines like “Did the Big Bang really happen?” or “The mystery of the origins of the universe is far from solved.”

What is more, there are still several models of the universe. As we have seen, there is the dominant Big Bang model and the Steady State model, even at present adhered to by a few cosmologists. But now, based on the “string” and M(embrane) theories, there are also models which bypass the initial explosion and say that the universe started off as a dense sea of black holes; or that it was sparked by a collision between two “membranes” floating in higher-dimensional space; or that our universe was originally ripped from a larger entity, and that countless baby universes will be born from the wreckage of ours. It would seem that there is hardly a cosmological theory in science fiction that is not backed up by theoretical physics, or made acceptable by the addition of a number of dimensions or universes.

Moreover, the “Cambridge Group” consisting of Hoyle, Bondi and Gold, presented as late as 1993 a revamped steady-state model which posited that there has been a succession of “little big bangs” like the one that created our universe. And Halton Arp, former assistant of the great Edwin Hubble himself, remains a stubborn opponent of the standard Big Bang theory. But one of the most impressive stances against the Big Bang was that by John Maddox, for years the physics editor of the prestigious science journal Nature. In 1989 he wrote in an editorial, with the argumentative title “Down with the Big Bang”: “Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an over-simple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.” It has survived even two decades ahead, but it is now, as mentioned above, one among several rival theories which are not yet sufficiently simplified to become the standard fare of the media.

This means that if one reads statements of the following sort: “We can be very confident about tracing the history [of the universe] back to within about one-billionth of a second after the universe began,” one should question the confidence. Statements like this, by the arch-scientific-materialist and fertile popular author Peter Atkins, belong to the gospel of the Church of Scientism. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics and the author of The First Three Minutes, is less forward, and writes in that very book: “I cannot deny a feeling of unreality in writing about the first three minutes [let alone the first one-billionth of a second], as if we really know what we are talking about.” ¹⁹

The main problem is that present-day cosmology uses the mathematical instruments of present-day physics to calculate fantastically complex events in a past many billions of years ago and totally different from the present circumstances. New technological instruments, like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, do allow to see billions of light years into the past of the cosmos, but the interpretation of the obtained data rests on theories which are quite novel and changing all the time. Serious doubt has arisen about the fact that the laws and constants of physics are absolute. This means that the problem lies in the extrapolations back in time, in applying what is deemed valid now to what happened then. David Shramm acknowledges that, as cosmologists venture further back toward the beginning of time, their theories become more speculative. And Howard Georgi confided to the science journalist John Horgan: “You’re trying to look at the present-day universe and extrapolate back, which is an interesting but dangerous thing to do, because there may have been accidents that had big effects.” ²⁰ By “accidents” Georgi meant events the nature of which is unknown and cannot be known or foreseen in the context of the present scientific paradigm.

Pralaya: The Big Bang and the Big Crunch

All things we know of originate in one way or another, exist for a shorter or longer time, disintegrate and die. This is how we perceive their life cycle in time. Until recently this life cycle has been projected, at least in the West, on the whole of existence, considering our present universe as the one and only. But the Brahman is eternal, and if it has manifested at one moment of its existence, it must have manifested and will be manifesting continuously in all its eternity. “The universe persists or always comes back into manifestation, because the will to become is eternal and must be so since it is the inherent will of an eternal Existence,” wrote Sri Aurobindo.²¹

In The Life Divine we read also: “The emergence of the movement from the Immutable is an eternal phenomenon and it is only because we cannot conceive it in that beginningless, endless, ever-new moment which is the eternity of the Timeless that our notions and conceptions are compelled to place it in a temporal eternity of successive duration to which are attached the ideas of an always recurrent beginning, middle and end.” ²² Which means that we do not have “any surety that there ever was or ever will be a period in time when no form of universe, no play of being is represented to itself in the eternal Conscious-Being.” ²³ “[The ancient Hindu] believes that Nature has repeated itself over and over again, as indeed it is probable she has done, resuming briefly and in sum at each start what she had previously accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth in the symbols of the Puranas.” ²⁴

In this view the ancient Hindu concept of pralaya, or dissolution of a universe, is part of the eternal process of manifestation. This concept was even less than a century ago thought of as part of the old mythical Hindu lore, just like the cycles of time were part of the mythology of ancient Greece. Now, amazingly, not only is the universe supposed to have burst forth from a magic primordial particle, the question “what came before the Big Bang?” has become scientifically legitimate, as has the question what to expect after the Big Crunch, when our universe will have died. Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, for instance, have published a book with the title Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, and consequently beyond the collapse that will be the Big Crunch. “They say they were motivated to form a new theory as the Big Bang came to require more and more exotic elements – inflation, dark matter, dark energy – to make it fit observations.” And string theory has spawned not only the possibility of a multitude of universes, a “multiverse,” but an infinity of them.

Paul Steinhardt is not a science fiction writer, he is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton. His opinion: “Recently some cosmologists have been exploring the possibility that the universe is exponentially older [than thought until now]. In this picture, the evolution of the universe is cyclic. The Big Bang is not the beginning of space and time but a sudden creation of hot matter and radiation that marks the transition from one period of expansion and cooling to the next cycle of evolution. Each cycle might last a trillion years, say. Fourteen billion years marks the time since the last infusion of matter and radiation, but this is brief compared to the total age of the universe. Each cycle lasts about a trillion years and the number of cycles in the past may have been ten to the googol power or more!” ²⁵ “Googol” is a fancy word that means an unimaginably big number. All at once science too discovers the enormous time spans of “a day of Brahman” and “a year of Brahman” in the Hindu scriptures, time spans which seem to have some meaning after all in the mental construct of an “oscillating universe,” in other words “the cyclic world revisited,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Davies.

In Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation, however, this is not the senseless recurrence of a Nietzschean eternal and eternally exact replication. “[The ancient Hindu] believes that Nature has repeated [her cycles] over and over again, as indeed it is probable she has done, resuming briefly and in sum at each start what she had previously accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour. It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetually self-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which is imaged and set forth in the symbols of the Puranas.” ²⁶

Multiple Universes and Typal Worlds

In “The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds” in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has given an unprecedented description of “the world-stair,” the tremendous hierarchic scale of worlds that form the divine manifestation. All consist of their specific substance – vital, mental, spiritual; all are peopled with countless beings; all are perpetual and exist in complete contentment according to their nature. Sri Aurobindo has called them “typal” worlds, because they are not subject to change. In these countless gradations of existence, however, there is one world where change is the law: our material, evolutionary world. Matter is an evolutionary product of the Inconscient into which the Absolute has plunged to experience the Lila of rediscovering himself. Matter may be considered the lowest form of substance, although it too is the Divine.

“The material universe is only the façade of an immense building which has other structures behind it, and it is only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance.” (Letters on Yoga)²⁷ “The immense material world in which we live is not the sole reality but only one of innumerable potential and existent universes; all of them need not have either Matter as we know it or the Inconscient for their base. Indeed this world of matter is itself dependent on many planes of consciousness and existence which are not material; for these have not this gross substance as their foundation or as the medium of their instrumentation of energy and consciousness or their primary condition of existence.” ²⁸

As we have seen, according to Sri Aurobindo the creation of a new universe or universes is a phenomenon of the Eternal that must be continuously repeated. “For what was that portentous date in the history of eternal Nothing on which Being was born out of it or when will come that other date equally formidable on which an unreal all will relapse into the perpetual void?” he asks ironically.²⁹ And he answers: “Creation has no beginning and no end. It is only a particular creation that can be said to have a beginning and an end.” ³⁰

“For when was the beginning? At no moment in Time, for the beginning is at every moment; the beginning always was, always is and always shall be. The divine beginning is before Time and in Time and beyond Time for ever. The Eternal Infinite and One is an endless beginning.

“And where is the middle? There is no middle; for the middle is only the junction of the perpetual end and the eternal beginning; it is the sign of a creation which is new at every moment. The creation was for ever, is for ever, shall be for ever. The eternal Infinite and One is the magical middle term of his own existence; it is he that is this beginningless and endless creation.

“And when is the end? There is no end. At no conceivable moment can there be a cessation. For all end of things is the beginning of new things which are still the same One in an ever developing and ever recurring figure. Nothing can be destroyed for all is He who is for ever. The Eternal Infinite and One is the unimaginable end that is the never closing gate upon new interminable vistas of his glory.” ³¹

The central problem of science, as practiced since “the scientific revolution” in the 17th century, is that it recognizes only matter as the substance of reality and the object of its study. The wisdom of ages in East and West has held that the layers of reality are those of matter, the life forces, mind, and the spirit, in the traditions called the “Chain of Being.” Since Lorentz and Einstein materialistic science has to accept from its formulas that matter equals energy, and that each term can be transformed into the other.³² Two of the basic tools of the scientific method are measurement and mathematics, the third one being systematic experimentation. However, measurement and mathematics are only applicable to material objects, and materialistic science has itself already shot far past the boundaries of matter into an occultism where the intellect feels lost. Of this the paradoxes of quantum mechanics are a telling example.

“Neither the laws or the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Human Cycle.³³ And elsewhere: “Having examined and explained Matter by physical methods and in the language of the material Brahman, – it is not really explained, but let that pass, – having failed to carry that way of knowledge into other fields beyond a narrow limit, we must then at least consent to scrutinize life and mind by methods appropriate to them and explain their facts in the language and tokens of the vital and mental Brahman.” ³⁴

Western scientific materialism, after initially accepting the Book of God (the Bible) and the Book of Nature, as Galileo and Kepler did, has rejected the former and accepts exclusively the latter, not realizing that it is trying to decipher an amputated version. To solve its own fundamental problems, to approach closer to reality, and to see ultimately the face of Truth, it will have to recognize the other levels and dimensions of the world. “If science is to turn her face towards the Divine, it must be a new science not yet developed which deals directly with the forces of the life-world and of Mind and so arrives at what is beyond Mind; but present-day science cannot do that.” ³⁵

The way science sees itself has changed since the publication in 1972 by Thomas Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Scientists are now aware of how dependent their theories and even their formulas are on paradigms which are sure to change one day. Such changes are painful and bitterly fought by the old against the new; they are said to become definitive only after the death of those who refuse to accept that they were wrong. A science which will one day venture into the realms of life and mind Sri Aurobindo called the “future science.” And he warned that it will be “a big step to take.”

Only then will be recognized that the universe, universes or multiverse – whatever they may really be – are there as the body of hiranyagarbha, the Golden Child, of which the Upanishad says: “In the beginning the Golden Child arose. Once he was born, he was the one lord of creation. He held in place the earth and the sky.” For this is what is also said in the two lines of our chosen passage on which we have not commented:

Into its forms the Child is ever born

Who lives for ever in the vasts of God.