New Unitive Paradigm Bridges Religion and science may seem like Cain and Abel, jealous brothers. Yet their common link lies in respect and quest for truth. Mysticism, the experiential dimension to religion, finds an easier time bonding with science, especially the postmodern science of quantum physics. Edgar Cayce was one of a long line of religious mystics who not only discussed the nature of God, but also outlined matters of interest to scientists and philosophers--such as the nature of consciousness and the relation of mind to matter. Perhaps it should be no wonder, that since they used consciousness as their medium of exploration, mystics universally reported that consciousness was primary to the material world, not the other way around. As science is now passing through its materialistic phase and onto its next, the quantum phase, it has now reaffirmed the basic axioms of its ancestors, claiming consciousness to be the fundamental reality. This wedding of science and mysticism has recently received a new accounting. It is the book, Bridging Science and Spirit: Common Elements in David Bohm's Physics, the Perennial Philosophy, and Seth (Living Lake Books). The author, Norman Friedman, is an electrical engineer who started the book as a quest to explore the spiritual implications of quantum physics and discovered a profound unity between them using a third perspective as a link. That third perspective is the psychic or paranormal perspective provided by "Seth" or the channeled writings of Jane Roberts. The new accounting is the latest in what will undoubtedly be many attempts to express the new unitive paradigm. David Bohm (now deceased) is perhaps the most influential of the new physicists. He made both important contributions to that new physics and to its philosophical implications. The bottom dropped out of the world when it was discovered that there was no objective reality of "things," but only patterns of energy. How that energy manifests is a function of the consciousness of the observer. We co-create reality by our choices. David Bohm helped create the awareness of a unitive field, the implicate order that transcends time and space, in which all possibilities exist at once. Past and future, here and there are all one, providing, among other things, a basis for understanding psychic phenomena. The Perennial Philosophy was a viewpoint made famous by Aldous Huxley. He showed that the underlying commonality to all religions and spiritual traditions is "Thou art that." This enigmatic statement is equivalent to Edgar Cayce's mysticism of oneness. Friedman introduces Ken Wilber's theory on levels of consciousness to expand the Perennial Philosophy. This theory suggests a story of God's oneness expressing in a myriad of apparently individual selves who then find their way back home to oneness, but now with a multicentered consciousness. The perennial theme of the One and the Many is played out in consciousness as well. A contemporary example is multiple personality syndrome. The author refers to Carl Jung's perspective on the collective unconscious and the multiplicities of the self as a way of introducing Jane Roberts's "Seth." This nonmaterial being had his own theory of consciousness and materiality, a view which Friedman shows has many parallels with Bohm's perspective. Underlying all three perspectives seems to be the same reality: love and light. That we can find this truth both within our hearts as well as in our science laboratories may create a new bridge of understanding for the generations to come. |