Certain Inclusivity

(5-minute read) – Things being connected across a divide sounds bizarre to the rational mind. Yet mystics experience a sense of oneness or connectedness – a certain inclusivity. Today, there is scientific reason to believe it may exist in the brain and in the quantum realm.

Astronomers, physicists and biologists see signs of patterns and connections in reality. There is something at work in the universe beyond the cause and effect relationships of Isaac Newton.

Few scientists today would say that we live in a clockwork universe where any future state can be determined from the current state. Certainly not on a quantum level.

Instead, theoretical scientists are working alongside mystics, if they’re not mystics themselves, in rediscovering the mysterious ways in which our world is interconnected outside the realm of Newtonian logic.

In a sense, scientists and theologians have come out of their respective corners where they vehemently defended their territory for so long. Today, there is a growing sense that the two fields of science and spirit are converging.

The mind is more wired than we thought

One such convergence is in the study of the human mind. There are signs that the brain is more than just a physical structure using cause and effect reactions. There are reasons to believe that the brain is more than a very powerful computer. It doesn’t only know answers by computation or calculation according to series chemical firing of neurons.

Remote parts of the brain seem to function in unison. The scientists’ lab door is open ever-so-slightly to the possibility that the brain comes to know truth through some kind of extra intelligence, or intuition or unknown level of connectivity.

This is similar to what the monastic theologians said centuries ago about the way to come to know truth through mystical union. It certainly supports the belief of many people who are convinced through their own personal experience of intuitive knowledge.

The medical doctor, J. R. Kriel, says a physical understanding of brain functioning is not good enough. It simply does not explain subjective experience, or consciousness. He writes that it is strange that descriptions of the brain are still so often based on cause and effect theories when it is obviously a relational structure.

One of the reasons for this is the unwillingness of science to let go of its Newtonian tradition.

We need a breakthrough to understanding our brains better. And we have that breakthrough – it is called synchronicity.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is integration of remote mental activities in the human brain. This newly discovered brain behaviour goes beyond the series firing of neurons in neural tracts that accounts for logical and rational thought. It goes beyond grouping of these neurons into neural networks that accounts for associative thinking and emotional patterns.

Synchronicity may account for spiritual intelligence or transcendent perception.

Recent research has shown that neurons in every area of the brain, involved in a particular perception of an object, oscillate in unison. The synchronous oscillations unite the many different localised perceptual responses into one overall experience of the object.

The mind seems to be more than material brain. The whole seems to be more than the sum of its parts.

But is action at a distance real?

Einstein thought not. He said it is impossible to have action at a distance with no physical joint or field connecting the cause and effect. There had to be some intermediary medium. For example, in the case of the magnetic attraction of bodies in a vacuum, a magnetic field is at work.

Up until recently science clung to this Newtonian version of reality – called ‘local realism’. But, it turns out local realism may not be the whole story.

Quantum mechanics showed in the 1920’s that particles can affect each other across vast distances. A proof emerged in 1964 for what lay implicit in the mathematics for 40 years, when John Bell devised an experiment to measure these non-local affects. Another 18 years passed before someone performed the test successfully. In 1982, Alain Aspect managed to achieve this.

He took a pair of subatomic particles that were bound together. He released the bound particles, and they shot away from one another near the speed of light. But he found correlations between the particles when he measured their spins in different locations. They seemed to affect each other even though they had no known connection – there was an unknown connection.

The greatest discovery of all science

The discovery opens our understanding of the makeup of reality. There are potential loopholes in the Aspect experiment. So, we don’t know for sure. What the experiment has done is focus many great minds on the possibility of previously unknown action at a distance. And it has forced scientists to admit… we don’t know for sure.

Traditionally, science confidently placed objects and particles above all else, and regarded any patterns that emerged in their behaviour as mere coincidence.

Now, many quantum theorists place the pattern above all else. Everything connects on a quantum level. Yet local macro agents, like you and I, can still freely control our surroundings as Newtonian bodies in an invisible entanglement.

Quantum entanglement is like a matrix weaving everything together. The links don’t constrain and bind our local world, but support and free it.

Nor do the links hide within some ethereal fog. Non-locality opens itself to investigation.

Exciting times

Today very few scientists deny that unknown things exist in the quantum realm – there are hypotheses that border on mystical to try and explain these things. Our world is connected in ways that defy the reductionist materialist perception of Newtonian cause and effect.

More scientists are mystics these days than fifty years ago… and interesting times lie ahead at the gathering of science and religion. More discoveries await in an age of authentic awakening – or re-awakening to a time before the rule of modern Newtonian science.