this means nothing
The synthesis of science and spirit.
by Dennis – posted 5/30/2011
 

 

"Quantum Physics"

For a very long time, I have been fascinated with physics and especially quantum physics and, more recently, astrophysics. Since 1979, the same year I began my study of A Course in Miracles, I embraced what has been called, "The Big Bang Theory." I suspected that both of my studies had much in common, a kinship that was more than a feeble reach to coalesce usually distant and frequently incompatible ideas.

Over the centuries, science and religion have not co-existed very well. Something in quantum physics and in particular, "The Big Bang Theory," was drawing me toward, rather than pushing me away, from my idea of God, and the nature of His creation. Last week something happened that affirmed my belief in a common ground.

I learned that Brad Lemley was about to release his interview with Dr.Alan H. Guth, the World's top cosmologist and father of "The Inflationary Theory of the Universe." The discourse, which is the major amendment to the Big Bang Theory, shook the physics World and is likely to earn him a coveted Nobel Prize.

Hold on; let us back up a moment and get everyone on the same page, especially my right brain friends. The theory of The Big Bang is that cosmological phenomenon which attempts to answer the question of how our Universe began. In 1922, it was a curiosity but by the late 60's, cosmologists were convinced, and able to prove that our Universe had its beginnings some fifteen billion years ago. The conceptual event happened from a centrally located, immense explosion. That ultimate peal of energy became known as, "The Big Bang."

All we know about the Universe and everything that is in it, originated in that single astonishing blast. It's effects continue to this day as matter continues to accelerate and separate from all other matter. Interestingly enough, cosmologists also tell us that although the Universe is expanding, everything in it has a mutual attraction to join with all else. A yearning, perhaps, to reunite.

The Universe is emigrating from a miniscule core, once a hot, densely packed, single microscopic speck. 10-34 second (that is a fraction of a fraction of a billion, trillionth of a second) after "The Bang", the Universe was the size of a marble. Were it not
so hot and heavy, you could have held it in your hand! This has been scientifically accepted for some time. What the Big Bang did not explain was where this stuff of the "Bang" came from and why it went boom in the first place.

Cosmologists pondered while Helen Schucman channeled the final chapters of "A Course in Miracles." In the 1970's, an obscure MIT post Doctorate physicist named Alan Guth ventured an educated guess. That would be the subject of Lemley's
Discover Magazine article. When my copy arrived the cover announced rather blatantly that:

"THE UNIVERSE (HAD) BURST INTO SOMETHING FROM-ABSOLUTLY NOTHING-ZERO, NADA AND AS IT GOT BIGGER (so did my eyes) IT FILLED WITH EVEN
MORE STUFF THAT CAME FROM ABSOLUTLY NOWHERE. How is that possible?"

Discover begged.

1) "The Universe," Alan Guth suggested, "came from nowhere and out of nothing." Twenty-five years earlier his critics had groaned, but Guth set about proving what he would call, "The Inflationary Theory of the Universe."

2) By the late 1980's, contemptuousness had turned to curiosity and by 1991 not only had Guth stilled his detractors by making his theory scientifically provable, but had pretty much turned his critics to converts. Clearly, something could arise out of
nothing. "The Universe," Dr.Guth contends, "was very likely a spontaneous creation, a no strings gift that boiled out of absolutely nowhere by means of utterly random but nonetheless scientifically possible process."

3) At this point in my reading, something grabbed me, shook me up and down, and produced a thought, which simply would not let go. It danced in my head and screamed; "tiny mad idea - bang, tiny mad idea - bang". After babbling the phrase and accompanying it with some crude conga steps, I sat down and got it together long enough to resume reading. But by now two reality concepts had joined, if not
homogenized, in my mind. I will come back to that in a moment.

My article, "This Means Nothing," takes its name from an event in the life of Helen Schucman. In one of her many visions, familiar to Course students, Helen beheld Michelangelo's great statue, the "Pieta," which depicts the dead Jesus sprawled across his mother Mary's lap. Helen beheld the statue before her and heard Mary
exclaim, "This means nothing."

4) Consider the enormity of this utterance spoken by a loving mother having just witnessed her child's crucifixion! Clearly, the words are not a denial of what has happened, but an affirmation of that which she and her son, and now many others know as truth: "This means nothing."

There is no death; there is no world. It is … nothing

Today, leading cosmologist Guth and most physicists agree that all matter plus all gravity in the observable Universe equals exactly and absolutely…. zero! The Universe could come from nothing because it is fundamentally nothing!

Does this resonate of "Miracles?"

"It is rather fantastic," Guth admits, "to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings."

5) I asked myself, how do we know any of this is true? "There really are tests," Guth assures us. I for one, along with the more professional and learned in such matters, find his answers compelling. "To the average person it might seem obvious that
nothing can happen in nothing, but to a quantum physicist, nothing is, in fact, something."

6) That comment by Brad Lamley reminded me of something I have always been fond of saying: "the world and all that's in it is a fact, but, it's not true. It is nothing. It is illusion."

Like many a Miracles student, theologians and now cosmologists, Alan Guth found himself in a dilemma. An uncreated Universe suggests anarchy, chaos, and pointless lives. To the more faithfully conservative, that idea is heresy. To this problem Guth
responds, "This does not mean that our lives are meaningless. It means we must give meaning to our lives ourselves."

7) I put down the April issue of Discover Magazine, did another conga step, took a deep breath, and reached reassuringly for my tattered copy of "A Course in Miracles, Workbook for Students."

It was all there:

Lesson one: "Nothing I see means anything."

Lesson two: "I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me."

Lesson Six:" I am upset because I see something that is not there."

Lesson thirty-two: "I have invented the world I see."

Workbook lesson six is especially appropriate since Alan Guth tells us, "if there is no matter, then there are no properties of objects, how can those laws (laws of physics) continue to operate when the object is not really there?"

Lesson fifty-two says, "Nothing in God's creation is affected in any way by this confusion of mine, I am always upset by nothing."

8) Why do I persist in believing in an illusory World that is upside down and backwards? No wonder we are fearful, forever striving and never really finding the security we seek. Our lives are lived on premises that do not exist, on facts
not in evidence. We seek but do not find and cannot find because what is not of God, is… nothing.

The "Inflationary Theory" leaves little room for many of the world's religious thoughts and no doubt this is true for those belief systems that are based upon an earth bound, God created, directed, and controlled Universe.

However, the theory itself is remarkably like the essential reality thesis of "A Course in Miracles," which says: "Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

9) From this error-idea evolved a Universe which The Course, and now cosmologists call, nothing. What then is reality? The Course answers, "You may be surprised to
hear how very different is reality from what you see. You do not realize the magnitude of that one error. It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total unreality had to emerge."

10) How do we live in an illusion which, is "nothing at all?" By changing our minds and realizing it is nothing, and living by that principle which offers forgiveness.

"The real world was given you by God in loving exchange for the world you made and the world you see. Only take it from the hand of Christ and look upon it. It's reality will make everything else invisible, and as you look upon it you will remember that it was always so. Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen it truly."

11) Has the time come to see it truly? In the strangest, but most welcome of unions, a book dictated by the hero of Christianity and channeled through a
small Jewish woman in New York, finds accord with the most far reaching and incredulous theory of today's leading cosmologist. Science and spirit have found agreement.

What is real?, I ask. A quiet voice answers, "All that speaks of love. Seek it in the Christ within and in all others, for this is the way out of your nothingness and back to your home in Heaven."

Amen.

May God's love be an experience that you live with,
Dennis