In the late 90s and early 00s, I spent a lot of time in the company of an aging Indian physicist who had made a fortune on his share of the patent for an industrial laser and wanted to invest his remaining time on earth studying cosmology, the science of the origins and destiny of the universe, and its connections with the timeless philosophy of his native land. I edited his memoir, which became a book called CODE NAME: GOD, and I co-authored a primer on cosmology titled THE COSMIC DETECTIVE. This physicist was not afraid of metaphysics, and in doing research for him, I became more aware of things like consciousness studies and Neo-Platonism that had hovered around my mind like hummingbirds for years but never quite landed. But he always brought it back to science, and ultimately, to mathematical equations that I couldn’t grok. One day, sitting on the veranda of his Bel-Air home, beside the infinity pool, looking out toward the Pacific and Catalina Island, he said, “Science tells us that everything is made of energy, but science cannot tell us what energy is. It can only tell us what it does.”
“If it’s true,” I replied, “That everything is energy, then what’s the real difference between energy and God?”
He smiled at me and answered, “It’s possible there isn’t any difference.”
Now, we were not discussing this as Sufis, or devotees of Ramakrishna, or Neo-Platonists, or crystal-gazers. We each had a glass of very cold Sancerre in our hands, he had a scratch pad full of equations on his knee, and we had just been talking about whether or not anyone had yet found a way to fully explain Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity to ordinary people. And yet we had strayed naturally into the twilight zone between science and religion, and this would happen again and again as the years progressed. The conviction that everything is energy is really a form of what the philosophers call neutral monism, the notion that:
Every thing is made of the same thing, and that thing has the ingredients (or embodies the potential for) both physical and mental states.
Some very smart people, including Bertrand Russell and William James, have been neutral monists, and among philosophers of consciousness like Thomas Nagel, it is an increasingly widespread worldview. And the thing is that when you allow the imaginary wall that separates science from spirituality to crumble, you begin to glimpse a striking concordance between the most advanced science and the most ancient and venerable spiritual systems. If we start with the proposition that we are one thing, and use our brains like a high-powered internet search engine, we find our way pretty quickly to this:
We are one thing: Hindu Philosophy (Advaita Vedanta, Shaktism, etc.)
We are one thing: Sufism. (Ibn ‘Arabi’s ‘oneness of Being’ or waḥdat al-wujūd)
We are one thing: Christian Mysticism (e.g., Meister Eckhart, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me”)
We are one thing: Jewish Mysticism (“all things derive from the Ein-Sof”)
We are one thing: Neo-Platonism (Plotinus, Proclus - ‘The One’ is the sum and source of all)
We are one thing: Panentheism (the world and all creation are cells in the body of God)
We are one thing: Neutral Monism (the ultimate reality is all of one kind)
We are one thing: Quantum Physics (all things emerge from the quantum vacuum)
The list could go on, but those are the big ones. Beyond this commonality, all systems of mystical belief, and to be honest, all systems of scientific belief hold to the tenet that we don’t know oneness unless we are able to see it, whether through an epiphany, such as those experienced by both Vivekananda and Einstein, by coming to a totally new worldview that allows perception of the dance of energy going on before our eyes, or through data collected from a particle accelerator. You would think that developing this ‘sight’ ought to be the great priority in human endeavor, because if everyone had it, all notions of tribe, race, nation, and all forms of dualism would end, making the universe a much cooler place to inhabit. But science has a problem with this particular leap, because it feels like a leap of faith rather than logic. Science cannot reconcile itself to the notion that consciousness could arise from something other than the material constituents of matter, because science has not found a way (or may, by definition, be unable) to describe non-material things. And so, it goes looking for “consciousness particles” or unknown “non-physical” properties of matter that, in concert with known properties of matter could produce consciousness. When it comes to God, the problem is even thornier. Until the mid-19th century, a scientist could be a person of faith and see no serious conflict between the two. He might simply see science and religion as two different ‘departments’ of reality, as in “Here is what we can observe and measure: this is science. Here is what we can neither observe nor measure, yet must be taken to be real in order to account for what we can: this is God.” But science has long since ceased to be merely agnostic about God. It now must be almost aggressively atheistic. It must see God as an active threat.
The opinion I have come to hold, now, in the twilight years of my own life, is that this is a fallacy. God is no threat to science. Not if we redefine God as the “one thing.” Not if we redefine God as energy. Science can see energy acting in the world in all sorts of ways, and has become astoundingly good at quantifying them. But as my Indian physicist friend said, science cannot tell us what it is, or even where it came from. Well, you say, it came from the Big Bang. Sure. But on many levels, the Big Bang is a kind of Just-So story. It is the place where we cease to know. It is our substitute for “Let there be light.” It’s a very good Just-So story, because from Edwin Hubble on, it has allowed us to “run back the clock” to the very edge of creation, to a time when there was nothing but energy. But that’s where the clock stops. Don’t fret, says materialistic science. It all came ex nihilo. From nothing. Yet every vibrating string of our consciousness (not to say our common sense) tells us that nothing but nothing can come from nothing. And the cosmos and all within it is inarguably something.
The God-problem is a problem of definition, a problem aggravated by all forms of fundamentalism, including scientific fundamentalism. God is neither lawgiver nor judge, and has no particular interest in human or animal or plant behavior. But this is not to say that God has no interests. If we take the position that E (Energy) = G (God), then God very much has an interest—we might say, an investment—in the universe. To understand how this investment might play out, and how revolutionary an understanding of this might be, we need to recalibrate our minds to allow for the possibility of panentheism, the idea that the world is in God. That we—and all things—are akin to cells in the “body” of God. If everything is energy, this actually makes a lot of sense. Through processes now well understood by physics and biology, energy agglomerated into the things of this universe, such as stars, and we come from stars. (This is not just a Joni Mitchell lyric: we really are stardust) In this way, God became the universe, and is yet still transcendent, as energy is. God is in us, and we are in God, and science, in its heart of hearts, knows this. Energy can never be without purpose, because its very nature is to act (the thing that science describes so spectacularly well). It is never ‘still,’ not even at the zero-point level of the quantum vacuum. It is engaged in a constant creation. It flows, it courses through, it imbues, it animates, it induces sentience, and ultimately, through consciousness, makes its creations aware of its existence within them and their existence within it. This awareness is what the mystics call, simply, God-consciousness.
Is it the word itself that makes you flinch? If you say ‘God,’ will you become one of them? The ones who don’t ‘follow the science?’ Then choose another word. Call it flux, or ροή, the Greek word for flow. It doesn’t matter. Whether through logic or intuition, particle accelerators or divine revelation, all things come to it eventually.
In Sufi theology, one hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet or to God) stands out above all others. It is known as The Hadith of The Hidden Treasure, and it goes like this:
I was a hidden treasure; I loved to be known. Hence I created the world so that I would be known.
This is the only explanation God needed to offer for the universe. If we take my proposed redefinition of God as one that is compatible with the postmodern mind, it still works.