Where science meets magic

UNIVERSALITY AND THE COSMIC MAN

2007-07-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

From Mandelbrot working in the IBM laboratories to Feigenbaum working on the universal nature of chaos to the Germans, Peitgen and Richter trying to make sense of nature the answer was the same: Fractals are universal in the morphology of nature. Their existence means that no phenomenon can ever be satisfactorily explained on the basis of specific local events. It also means that in a sense the Newtonians, intuitively, were right and everything is predetermined: man’s fate is written in the stars; affected by the time of birth. Determinism however operates by the application of limits and within those limits reigns chaos!

Presaging the modern scientific developments at a slightly earlier date Alistair Crowley had said that “man is capable of being, and using, anything which he perceives, for everything that he perceives is in a certain sense part of his being...”.

That much is certainly true for fractals are active even within us: Though the anthropomorphic theory of semen has long since been discarded, DNA cannot specify the vast number of detail that goes in the particular spatial structure of man, animal or plant, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development that is in nature the same for all!

Mandelbrot in his study of the shapes of nature discovered that whether studying vuscular, pulmonary or botanical trees or the formation of snowflakes there was, waiting to be perceived, an underlying unity. Not a similarity of appearance or characteristics but (as magic has long specified) a similarity of process.

To the eyes of chaos scientists’ discovery a rising column of smoke breaking into wild swirls, a flag flapping in the wind, a dripping faucet, the weather, the flight of a plane, oil flowing in a pipe, cars on the motorway, the spread of galaxies in the solar system, the rise and fall of prices on the stock exchange and the emotions of a populace are all governed by the same invisible but all pervading principle.

The world view that is emerging from the discoveries of Chaos is one of infinite processes contained within finite limits. The mind of man containing the entire process of the Universe. The falling of rain from the sky attributed as much to the prayers of the shaman as to global weather conditions. The death of a king, the birth of a child; as connected to the spatial configuration of the planets as that configuration is linked to the presence of man on Earth.

It is singularly ironic that nearly 200 years after Franz Anton Mesmer’s death and the discrediting of his theory of animal magnetism his fellow countrymen, mathematician Heinz-Otto Peitgen and physicist Peter H. Richter would spend sleepless nights in their laboratory studying the magnetization and demagnetization of materials in order to fathom the workings of nature.

As the computer-generated pictures of the physical processes involved grew and grew in complexity they increased their computer magnification until at last one picture loomed particularly clear: the Mandelbrot set!With a nod to Mesmer and the enlightened thinkers that preceded him they wrote in their laboratory notes “Perhaps we should believe in magic”.

The Magic of Nature

2007-06-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

The science of Chaos was born out of the persistent attempts of a determined group of people from a dozen different scientific disciplines who, often working alone and in direct opposition to orthodox scientific beliefs, strove to make sense of what appeared essentially senseless and chaotic.

Working in a holistic manner that sought to look at the effect they were studying as a whole rather than isolate a single one of its parts, they came to grips with nothing less than the boiling broth of the magician: creating order out of anarchy...on a cosmic scale!

Their holistic approach paid off.

They found that there is a correspondence of scaling that is constant in everything, from the way leaves on a tree are shaped to the shape assumed by the dancing flame of a candle.

They realised what magicians have known all along: To make things work you do not require a minute knowledge of the working of every possible part of the connection you are studying, but a visual approximation of the generality governing it. Much like visualising the effect rather than the entire complex sequence of events that must lead to it.

Nature does the rest.

The man credited with laying down the foundations of the new science is physicist Mitchell J. Feigenbaum. His playground of speculation was a by now familiar numerical territory known as a complex plane that is composed of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ numbers, now recognised as arbitrary as both sorts can be as real or imaginary as any other sort.

What is remarkable is that the modern day definition of the complex plane sounds like an updated reiteration of the astral plane concept propagated by Eliphas Levi in 19th century Paris as a way of recovering the microcosm and macrocosm which science had rejected. As we’ve already seen the complex plane consists of two axis where numbers co-exist with their opposites. Levi said that the astral plane gives a picture of the “ultimate reality comprised by a unity compounded of opposites”!

Working within the context provided by the complex plane, Feigenbaum discovered that he could visualise shapes that corresponded not only to static things but also to motion.

Eliphas Levi in The Key to the Mysteries, wrote that the astral plane is filled with astral light “which is the fluidic and living gold of alchemy” and to control it is to master all things, “To direct the magnetic forces is then to destroy or create forms; to produce to all appearance or to destroy bodies; it is to exercise the almighty powers of Nature”!

The procedures and trappings of ritual magic then became -like the studying of the scientist- a means of directing and shaping the Will, making it part of the network of correspondences. Links between the universe and the human mind, which obtained in miniature all factors existing in the world outside it.

Even more to the point, the astral plane is the realm in which thoughts, imaginings and desires have an independent reality. In modern magical theory it is there that the traditional ascent of the spheres mentioned in The Sefer Yetsirah or Book of Creation takes place, enabling man to ascend to the point where he can see the nature of God.

Studying the pictures of the fractal shapes provided by mathematical manipulations in the complex plane, scientists can at last see a simple, beautiful, unifying order underlying the fabric of chaotic processes. An order that is encountered from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. An order that may reveal, according to Australian physicist Paul Davies, not just the nature of God but how God thinks!

Chaos in all directions

2007-06-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t like that always however. Mathematics was one of the less glamorous of the sciences and mathematicians, in the public eye, were no more exciting than accountants.

This all changed one wintry afternoon in 1975 when an IBM mathematician by the name of Benoit Mandelbrot, preparing his first major book-length work for publication, thumbed through a Latin dictionary looking for a word that would describe some peculiar-looking shapes his calculations had come up with.

He came across the adjective fractus from the verb frangere - to break. And, with a little playing around, the word fractals, was born.

Fractals, as the name suggests, are a family of jugged, tangled, twisted, splintered and fractured shapes which seem to underlie the very fabric of nature. They are present not only in static shapes like serrated edges and coastlines but also in the shapes formed by charting the scaling of motion (in the way a butterfly beats its wings or a pendulum swings, for example) or the rise and fall of cotton prices in the Stock Exchange and the way molecular cells transmit data.

Many of us will have probably seen the twisted, colourful designs which fractals today make, but what is truly beautiful about them is that their forms, as complicated as the mind of God according to those who study them, require but the most basic of instructions to recreate.

Using powerful IBM computers to analyse the formation of these structures, Mandelbrot discovered that they are but a variation of a single fractal shape which has since become known as the Mandelbrot set.

The essense of the discovery illustrates the sensitivity of any event to initial conditions and became the foundation of the inter-disciplinary science of Chaos.

Like new magicians, the Chaoticians that sprang up in the wake of Mandelbrot’s discovery, did not look upon the world in the reductionist, analytical manner of their predecessors but sought to gain an understanding of the underlying simplicity governing the behaviour of complex systems.

What Chaos teaches is that nothing can ever be predicted with accuracy because even the tiniest change in initial conditions can be responsible for tremendously large effects.In a statement of almost metaphysical quality chaoticians say that “the gentle beating of the wings of a butterfly in China is responsible for the tornadoes in Texas”!

If you think that’s overstating matters a little, or even edging away from the cold, precise logic of science, more shocks are in store, for the language used by today’s Chaoticians to describe the nature of fractals and the physical events they affect parallels that used by the historian and theoritician of magic, Eliphas Levi, and subsequently the controversial, self-styled ‘Great Beast’ Alistair Crowley.

The Complex Plane

2007-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

It would be all too easy, at this stage, to make a great deal about the traditional, age-long connection of mathematics with magic.

I won’t because it will neither lead anywhere nor provide any insights beyond the fact that at every stage of human history, there is a body of knowledge that is fiercely guarded from outsiders and may acquire semi-mystical status. And if you think that we’re beyond this stage now, just spend some time in the company of any self-styled computer ‘expert’ and you’ll see what I mean.

What I will make a point of mentioning however is that from the very first moment we looked at our world, mathematics has provided a key to both representing it and understanding its evolution.

Galileo Galilei rightly said, way ahead of his time, that “Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the Universe.” Today complex algorithms enable us, if we wish, to numerically codify everything we see around us, including our own selves and represent it in mathematical terms.

The capacity to do that has proved a double-edged knife. On the one hand it gave us greater understanding and it has given us the almost magical power to make predictions. From forecasting the weather to predicting the potential power of an explosion.

On the other hand, it armed Newtonians with the emasculating belief that everything was predictable in a clockwork universe in which we functioned as simple cogs in a machine of truly universal proportions. This single belief, more than anything else, stunted scientific thought for a great many years and proved almost the death of every magical concept.

Whatever the drawbacks however, the advantages of representing everything in terms of numbers formed the basis of ‘formalism’ in mathematics. This allowed mathematics to become more and more the formal manipulation of symbols and it gave rise to the place where mathematicians can dream while awake and the manipulation of both real and imaginary numbers can affect the world. Today, this is known as the Complex Plane of numbers. In very simple terms the complex plane is comprised of two axis at right angles to each other.

One axis goes from east to west and goes onto infinity, and on it is every positive and negative number we know (which are called ‘real’ numbers). The other axis, goes from north to south. It too is also infinite and on it, like familiar shadows, are the so called imaginary numbers. Each one representing the imaginary doppleganger of a real number.

The reason for this arrangement is that instead of looking at numbers on a single line which would give a one, dimensional and thus rather limiting, view of the world, we can now look at them in two dimensions.

Every number we want now can be expressed as a combination of its real and imaginary coordinates. This means that it does not exist on its individual line but rather somewhere in one of the four quadrants of the complex plane.

This simple technique allows mathematicians to examine not only the solidity of objects (say like a cube or a square) but also to study normally invisible quantities, like the shapes of motion, and the formations of temperature differences!

Their sojourns through the Complex Plane have made confirmed Neoplatonists out of some of the best mathematicians, who in turn have found themselves, unwittingly reiterating some of Plato’s most profound statements regarding the state of reality.

The Princeton mathematician Kurt Gödel, who formulated the dictum (known as Gödel’s theorum) which states that no matter how precise mathematical computations become there will always be truths whose existence cannot be mathematically proved, envisaged these truths as already existing in a Platonic domain somewhere “out there”, beyond our limited, mortal ken. More recently, the Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose said that “Mathematical truth is something that goes beyond formalism,” and went on to write that “There often does appear to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead being guided towards some external truth - a truth which has a reality of its own, and which is revealed only partially to anyone of us.”And discussing the implications of the system of complex numbers to be found in the complex plane Penrose rather apocryphically said that he felt it had “a profound and timeless reality”!

As if the examples of the overt similarities between the complex plane of mathematics and the Astral plane of High magic were not enough, the apparent ability to enter the complex plane (limited naturally only to those who’re adept at mathematics,) and toy around in it has given rise to discoveries and assertions which in turn have drastically altered the way we look at, and relate to the world around us (any of it sounds familiar so far?).

Images of the sleeping brain

2007-05-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

In order to understand one of the founding tenets of High Magic think of a place where nothing concrete exists. Think of it perhaps as a different world or another dimension, removed from, but still very definitely a part of our world.

In this place of relative nothingness, reality is supplemented by representing it in a stylistic form comprised largely of symbols. The magician can enter here, interact with the ethereal inhabitants of this strange world in a meaningful manner, and effect actions that will eventually impact on the ‘real’ world.

He may, for example, as a result of his actions gain fresh, new knowledge and insights that will help him in his work, or, in a more literal sense, he may set in motion forces that will eventually alter some aspect of what constitutes reality. Psychotic as all this may sound, before we dismiss it out of hand it’d do good to take a look at how exactly it came about in the first place. The earliest mention of some sort of etheric representation of man were made by the Neoplatonists of ancient Greece, who believed that the soul descended through heavenly spheres to enter a physical body on earth and during this voyage was in turn affected by the influence of each planet and therefore formed what was regarded as “the soul’s spiritual envelope”.

They in turn relied on the Platonic concept of a separate, independent reality that simply exists somewhere “out there” and which we can only attempt -not entirely successfully- to discover.Far fetched as this concept may seem today, in its heyday it was as good an explanation as any for the brain’s ability to imagine things it could not possibly experience.In those early days of strictly linnear logic it was held that if one did not directly or indirectly know of something, then his ignorance of it was equally unknown to him and hence it was not ignorance at all. Thus knowledge was more a journey of rediscovery than a sojourn into the unknown. To be able to imagine worlds and planetary arrangements where no physical man had ever been, for example, meant that the etheric mind (with its inherently greater capabilities) had somehow been there before it had entered the body.

This was a concept that gained tremendous popularity when it was rediscovered and restated in 1471 by the Florentine philosopher and Medici prodigeé, Marsilio Ficino.

Working from a pilfered Greek manuscript of the Hermetica, delivered directly from Macedonia to Florence by a Medici agent, Ficino propagated the concept, of an etheric or ‘astral’ body that supplied a set of consonances between man and the heavens.

At the time no explicit mention was ever made of the body having an astral, conscious ‘double’ able to enter this etheric plane but, nevertheless, as the idea became more and more popular the seeds of astral travel were, unknowingly, being sown.

Now, astral travel, the ability of a magic adept to somehow project his mind into another plane, is a tenet that’s found at the very heart of High Magic. It requires us to believe that not only does the astral plane exist but that it can and does influence our lives in a very direct manner. Modern Freudian psychology has already cut its teeth in explaining how the associations thrown up by a ‘free-floating’ brain can dredge up esoteric symbolism in the mind and can present us with both solutions to current problems (hence Kekulé, amongst others) and also frighten us with the spectre of past ones recurring.

Jungians, in turn, have explained about the posited existence of archetypes in the brain so, that it would appear that what magicians have been swearing by for thousands of years are little more than self-created delusions. Mere ‘representations’ thrown up by the brain attempting to make sense of logical concepts when the analytical part of it has been switched off.

If things were left at that we could just say that, hey! Know what? All that recitation of mantras in smoky atmospheres is enough to addle anybody’s brains and psychologists have got it right. This astral travel stuff is just “all in the mind”. But we’ve already seen that the mind and everything in it are an inescapable part of what constitutes our Reality. We have seen that our perception of that reality can influence our subsequent actions to a positive or a negative effect. And we have furthermore seen that the way we perceive the world, the assumptions we are likely to make about it, may in fact play a large part in creating what we actually do perceive.

Confusing, no?

To avoid the logic trap of saying that what we perceive is true otherwise we cannot possibly perceive it, let us strip the concept of the astral plane of its historical baggage and examine it for what it really is.

Devoid of magical connotations, the astral plane then becomes an imaginary plane, a representational mode of our more concrete reality which contains none of the constraints (and hence all of the possibilities) of the concrete world. This, naturally means that somehow, it represents a ‘truer’ picture of our reality. One which we, bound by the physical limitations of our concrete senses, are unable to directly experience.

The magician etherically (read mentally) then, shedding these mortal limitations, enters this plane and by manipulating the symbolic representations that he encounters within it, achieves a greater understanding of the concrete world he normally inhabits. It’s as simple as that. And if it beggars belief, well it shouldn’t, for as concepts go, this one is logically sound.

And even hard-nosed mathematicians have been, quietly, entering this very same plane for many years.

In the plane of the impossible

2007-05-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

Now, it is no mean feat to dream without falling asleep. At the best of times it takes a little hard work and the right attitude. It’s what prayer and meditation have always been about and the fact that both forms of focussing the mind have survived to our day, and indeed are currently enjoying a revival, testifies to their efficacy.

Scientists, in general however, and mathematicians in particular, have always prided themselves on the fact that they don’t need to resort to such ‘unscientific’ methods in order to transport their minds into other worlds. Over the years they’ve evolved their own means of taking physically impossible jaunts through etheric worlds and, to the chagrin of yogis and mystics, have also managed to get paid for it. But before we look at their techniques it’s good to acknowledge that even the staunchest advocates of the scientific method have to sleep sometimes, and when they do, what they dream about makes for some very interesting assumptions.

One wintry day in 1865, in the clogged with horse-drawn buggies streets of Vienna, a notable German chemist by the name of Friedrich Kekulé, while waiting for his driver to take the buggy out of a traffic-jam, fell into a tired snooze.

He was tired because for the past few months he’d been working on a most vexing problem: that of discovering how exactly the chain of carbon atoms are linked in the benzene molecule.As he snoozed, he dreamt of carbon atoms in the form of dancing snakes, and as he watched (in his dream) their taunting dance, they all joined hands and formed a circle.

The discovery of the cyclical structure of the benzene molecule laid the basis for the foundation of organic chemistry and Kekulé, naturally, received all the credit for it. After all it had been his dream.

His closing words at the convention where he presented his findings were: “Let us learn how to dream gentlemen, and then perhaps we’ll learn to discover the truth!”Shamelessly I’ll use this classic example to hark back to my earlier analogy of the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that’s ran on it. The apparent ability of the mind to provide surprising answers and unexpected insights when to all intents and purposes, the brain has been ‘switched off’, is echoed by the half-joking comments of today’s computer programmers about their software misbehaving when the hardware is switched off.

While these concerns are fairly recent and date only as far back as the construction of fourth-generation computers, it is a fair assumption to make that given slightly different tools with similar functions, people with similar ambitions will largely replicate both each other’s successes and problems.

The brain has been mankind’s oldest tool, bent to the same problem-solving tasks as modern day computers and their attendant programmers. So it should not be surprising when the brain’s ‘software’ is capable of problem-solving even when the ‘wetware’ has been apparently switched off.

Company employees of the software giant Microsoft, humourously refer to inexplicable glitches caused by apparently inert software as ‘gremlins in the machine’. But the ‘gremlins’ as a quick jaunt through the history of magic, which has always had the brain and its function on centerstage, will show, have been there for a very, very long time.

It's all a dream

2007-05-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

The very fact that we can dream events which are lifelike, and on occasion, can be precognitive, begs the question: Where do dreams come from?

Trying to answer the very question physicist and science-fiction writer John Gribbin, seized upon the possibilities offered by two related theories: The quantum theory for describing the behaviour of matter at a sub-molecular level, and the many-worlds theory of John Wheeler.

The former theory implies that at a sub-molecular level, everything that is possible, also happens, while the latter, states something very similar, but on the scale of the entire universe.

So, according to Wheeler (and the quantum theory for micro-molecules) there is not just a single world, but an infinite array of all possible worlds, including some in which we do not exist at all. Everything that can possibly happen at every instant of the day and night does happen and statistical possibility is only dictated by the inability of our awareness to cross the divide between all these worlds and see that indeed this is so.

This divide, whatever it may be made of, is what restricts our awareness to a single world. The car, that nearly ran into the back of you on the motorway this morning, for example, did in fact ran into you, in one of those other worlds, only your awareness (and this is a thorny issue in its own right) was focussed on a world where that possibility did not materialise, which brings us full circle to the argument that the mind is capable of ‘shaping’ reality.

Gribbin says, that if the many worlds do exist ,in such an infinite array, then, occasionally our minds may be able to come in contact with our ‘doubles’ in these other worlds.To use a rather naive example, the three course meal you dreamt you were having, rather than being the result of your feeling a little peckish as you went to bed, may have been the result of your double’s activities in another world.

By the same token however, this double (or infinite number of doubles) must occasionally dream of our activities and puzzle where their dreams come from.

Wonderfully mind-bending staff as all this may be, its implications are clear enough. Either there is no such thing as fantasy and everything we can possibly imagine actually does happen (which puts paid to the concept of the creativity of fiction writers) or else we are all equally insubstantial.We, in our concrete, tangible, world enjoy no less a statistical probability to exist than the world of our dreams. To us, certainly, this world is solid enough, or at least it appears to be so. But to those inhabitants of those other myriads of parallel worlds we are just a dream, and the further away we move from the worlds on either side of us, the smaller becomes the possibility of our existence and the less substantial we become to those trying to envision us.

So, next time your head hits the pillow you may be heading not for the oblivion you think you deserve for having put up with the daily rote of traffic jams; cash-flow problems; and the constant wear and tear of work, but for a magical jaunt through space, time and the universe. Mathematicians of course, have been doing this for some time now. The beauty of it though is that they have been doing it without the benefit of sleep.

Dreams are made of this

2007-05-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

It is now necessary to provide a feasible mechanism through which dreams, the mind, faith, the power of belief and reality can interact.

To connect all these Bolus used the idea of the microcosmic man and a universe filled with invisible corresponding lines linking all elements within it.

This was, as we know, shot down by the deterministic, observer orientated model of the universe of Descartes and Newton. This in turn, left the Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, floundering to find a scientific basis that would explain the workings of his discovery of hypnotism. For all its lack of ‘poetry’ and strong belief in the discreet nature of things, the science of the time obligingly provided one.

Borrowing the notion from the ancient Greeks, Newton and the other advanced physicists and mathematicians of the time believed that there was an invisible substance called ether (or aether) which pervaded everything, even ‘empty’ space.

This gave Mesmer the idea for his “fluid of animal magnetism”. A universal medium in which all bodies were immersed and through which, Mesmer believed, the planets influenced human behaviour.

The ancient Greeks, Newton, Mesmer and later, Einstein, were part of a long line of thinkers who though strived to work through science; found it difficult to ignore the intuitive belief magic has always voiced, namely that the universe is filled with some kind of ‘substance’ that pervades everything. Much like Bolus’ corresponding lines of influence. It was Albert Einstein of course, who gave this belief its best known expression when he succinctly said: “Nature, abhors a vacuum.” This statement leaves the door wide open to the assertion that the mind (as well as the brain, and our physical body) are linked to the world and the universe through a host of invisible ties much in the same way as the tides of the sea are linked to the phases of the moon.

That means that our dream existence, as magicians believed, interacts, somehow with the universe. Trying to discover how, theoretical physicist John Wheeler, found himself tangling with the very fabric of reality. And the more closely he looked at it the less substance he found it contained. The reasoning is that matter is the same everywhere. Whether we exist as a carbon-based, long-haired, leather jacket clad, bipedal mammal who is on the constant look-out for potential mates of the opposite sex, or a lifeless lump of rock on the surface of the moon, we are, essentially, composed of the same fundamental staff.

The only difference lies in the vibrational mode of the atoms which make us up, which also indicate their state of energy. Energy, as Einstein proved is just another form of matter; or rather matter is a solid form of energy, thus, the energy state of any particular atom or molecule of matter also determines its identity. The same carbon that makes up our bodies, for example, exists in atomised form in the heart of stars. The minerals that swim in our bloodstream are also found in lumps beneath the Earth. Each contains a different amount of stored energy encapsulated in its molecular matrix and theoretically, by the studied application of energy, each can be transmutated into the other.Yet the fact remains that we are alive and these things are not. We don’t yet know what exactly life is. We do however, know precisely what it is not.

Trying to explain what the universe can possibly be made out of and how all these different forms of matter can arise, scientists have theorised the existence of a tremendously small micromolecule that fills the entire Cosmos, and which actually also forms ‘empty’ space. This micromolecule which is so small as to make the smallest atom by comparison look like the side of a house, is called a Superstring, and it exists in a state of constant vibration. As it vibrates in and out of different stable energy states it forms all forms of matter and all states of it.

Now, these micromolecules, at the moment, have only a purely mathematical existence. Because of their minute size their experimental observation is exceedingly difficult and the difficulty of directly observing them is further compounded by the predictions of the mathematical equations governing their behaviour.

The equations predict that these molecules exist not in the three dimensions we are accustomed to, or even in the four of Einsteinian Space-Time, but in nine! Eight dimensions of space and one dimension of time, and if you are finding this hard to visualise think of a crumpled ball of paper. Apart from its generally ‘smooth’ outer surface there are other, interior ones, which constitute, in our example, different dimensions of the paper-ball’s existence.

Superstrings then are responsible for the existence of practically everything, including us. So, we are all in effect, created out of the same staff that makes up the Universe and because of this our sentient minds may be able to tap into other aspects of this universe’s existence in ways we are not yet aware of.

Our consciousness, the argument goes, is the result of the “vibratory excitation of the complex molecular structure of the brain,” and our sense of perception is part and parcel of this. Change, for instance, the vibratory status of the molecules either chemically (with LSD for example), or electrically (by placing your body in a strong electromagnetic field) and you can also change the way the brain (and mind) interacts with the universe, we perceive, at a molecular level.

When we dream then, or when we are under extreme conditions of stress, our minds may be able to go into some sort of overdrive.

A kind of charged, energy state that allows our perception to expand in some way. To reach out, so that we can then experience something of the Superstrings’ other dimensions, which may be worlds not much different from ours but with their own set of natural laws.

The Hub of the Cosmos

2007-05-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

The proof of any pudding, I’m assured, is in the eating. And if science and magic can hope to convince us of the validity of their now joint premise regarding dreams they must be expected to furnish some proof. Magicians claimed that dreams were part of an independent reality. They were either part of the spirit world, or a variation of our world. In either case, they considered the dream world as distinct and separate from ours; concrete in its own way, and theorised that it could be entered only through voluntary or involuntary action by man (and his mind). This means that though not every dream qualified, to magicians, dreams were very real.

Science now also shares the belief that there’s more to dreams than mere moving images held in the mind which, like so many sensationalist films, are projected there simply to entertain or titillate us.

Finding the evidence to corroborate this belief however, presents a few problems. After all, while we all dream, we also all get up in the morning to carry out our daily routine in a predetermined world that seems a lot more concrete and ‘real’ than the dreamworld we inhabit at night. And though dreams are vivid and ‘life-like’ for most people, not everybody remembers what they dreamt in bed at night.

The same cannot however, be said for the everyday world which commands itself to our attention at every opportunity. But the concreteness that the world we live in presents, physicists assure us, is illusory. We feel that the world is real and dependable for three basic and distinct reasons:

1. While no one else seems to share our dreams other people seem to corroborate our experience of the world thus giving it instant, independent, credibility. Like fish need a sea in order to function as fish, the world becomes the medium in which we spend our lives and carry out our existence with some semblance of orderly progress.

2. Our world is ruled by time. To all intents and purposes, there does appear to be some sort of temporal orderly sequence running through our world. The mail in the morning arrives after the postman has been and we have to leave our house in order to arrive at our place of employment.

3. Finally, our world can hurt us. This point is indisputable. To fail to stop crossing the road when the pedestrian crossing light is on red can have deleterious consequences for our general well-being, to say the least.

These three points sum up any waking transaction of ours we may care to engage in, for they implicitly contain within their statements the seeds of the axioms that give our lives a sense of meaning and a sense of time. They furthermore imbue our every action with the sense of self-preservation and a measure of self-worth.It is naturally difficult to argue with any of them, but to each of these points physicists can produce a valid rebuttal: First, other people ‘seem’ to corroborate our experience of the world. We have no objective way of knowing what goes on inside their heads and so we must accept on faith that their perception of the world is the same as ours. The clearest example of the validity of this statement is given if you enter a clothes store that specialises in luminous green Hawaiian shirts. Now, without wanting to disparage the dress code of tourists on holiday to Hawaii, most people would balk at such sartorial excess, unless that is, you were accompanied by a person who is colour-blind to the colour green. Then your experience of distaste at the luminous green shirts would not be corroborated by your companion and while you would argue that he is colour-blind he may equally well argue that his brain is different from, and better than, yours and what he sees is the ‘true’ colour of the shirts and you are the one who sees an odd version of the world. And, in a manner of speaking, he would be right. The validity of the external world, like that of colours, lies in the brain’s interpretation of what it perceives. Optical illusions have shown time and again that perception can be fooled.

What we see ‘out there’ then is just an internal model which has been built according to the brain’s interpretation. In the above example for instance, the colour green had no place in our friend’s internal model of the world. This, in no way marred his model in other ways and as a matter of fact, as far as he was concerned, there was no sense of anything being ‘wrong’ with his version of the world.

Even the general consensus we take for granted in the daily world we live in, is arrived by a largely unconscious process of constant negotiation and reappraisal. We continually absorb information through media services, alter our perception of events by talking to other people, convince others of the validity of our opinions and constantly modify our internal model of what’s ‘out there’ to the point that if we were to meet a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who’d spent the last twenty-four years marooned on a desert island, we would be unable to converse with him in any meaningful sort of way as there would be no “common ground of reference”. His internal model of the world would be totally different from ours.

General consensus then, despite its outward validity, does not constitute a guarantee for the objective existence of anything.Secondly, our sense of time is artificial. The temporal orderly sequence of events in our world is also illusory. The philosophical discussions of the nature of Time, these days, sound like the staff of science fiction. There is talk of parallel universes; bio-gravitational wormholes in space-Time; and points of singularity lying in wait in the hearts of Black Holes.

For our purposes though it is sufficient to say that something as mundane as three glasses of champagne or a strong sedative can put paid to the belief that a disjointed, jerky sequence of events is the exclusive property of our dreamworld.

Thirdly, dreams can hurt us too. This third argument is probably the hardest to prove. There do exist concrete figures reflecting the numbers of people who have died in wars, famine, car accidents and as the result of gun-shot wounds. On the other hand there do not seem to be any figures that would corroborate any dream-casualties. This does not mean to say that they don’t exist.

We all have, at one time or another, woken up from a ‘persecution’ dream where we had to run for our life from some unnameable terror that seemed to be gaining in on us and just as it was about to close in we woke up.

That’s a defence mechanism. It’s not unlike our stopping before a red light, or wearing a flak jacket as we go through a war zone. Neither action will totally guarantee our safety but each does improve our chances of survival.

People do pass away in their sleep. Often for reasons which are not clearly understood. I can only guess here, but if the unnameable horror did manage to catch up with us in our dream would we survive the experience?

It needn’t injure our ‘physical’ body. If we take the conventional view and regard dreams as fantasy, their very vividness that raises blood pressure and heart rate could easily mean that if we were ‘caught’ by the horror in our dream, we could die from ‘natural’ causes. A stroke or heart attack perhaps brought on by the intense excitement. It needn’t even kill us immediately. A ‘dream death’ may upset our emotional and psychological balance and affect our concentration so much that we then have a fatal accident on our way to work or crossing the street. Thus experiencing a sort of death by delayed reaction perhaps?

This would mean that our mind, when we’re asleep, may be able to bypass the censor of the sleeping part of the brain and interact directly with ‘reality’ and with whatever’s ‘out there’, in a way that will later, when we wake up, guide our (waking) consciousness along that path of existence and thus force us to readjust our internal representation of the world and accordingly shape our perception of what’s ‘real’. The Australian physicist Paul Davies says that for the dreamer at least, “Dream objects undeniably enjoy a kind of existence...” but he also makes a clear-cut distinction between dream objects and our waking world. Although he acknowledges that dreams are just as substantial as, say, our concept of valour, honour or even bankruptcy, he remarks, that at present, dreams exist in a mode of reality which we are not properly equipped to deal with.

This does not mean that dreams are not real. Merely that they exist in a mode as far removed from what we consider ‘normal’ as our everyday waking life is from our dreamstate.

The Right Dream

2007-05-07T04:05:00.000-07:00

The first tangible proof that there is a ‘reality shaping’ mechanism inherent in the human brain which can be activated by dreams, came from a study carried out by a University of Michigan psychologist by the name of Hazel Markus. She asked university undergraduates of roughly equal academic ability to take part in an experiment that required them to visualise a positive and a negative self.

Some were asked, for example, to think of working in a mindless job and living in a run-down apartment, while others were given the task of visualising living a life in the sun, having a well-paid job and owning a ranch with a swimming pool.

After having been given sufficient time to ‘see’ themselves in detail in their given jobs and lifestyles the students were then put through a barrage of tests that included solving maths problems mentally and writing with their non-dominant hand.

Surprisingly, the students who had been given the positive images to focus on outperformed by a significant margin those who had taken on the role of ‘losers’ and had been given a negative image to visualise.

The implication is that even such an innocuous activity as visualising yourself, job and lifestyle in the future, can have a tremendous impact on your ability to cope with the present thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts.

Markus’ study was a small one. It did not go on long enough or in sufficient depth to indicate the exact nature of the reality shaping mechanism. Its findings however were sufficient to indicate that there is something there and that it can be made to work.

All the same, it would require an enormous leap of faith from your part, to equate the indications of a psychological study which analysed success in terms of self-motivation, crisis-coping ability and emotional stability when under pressure with the claims of medieval magicians that the brain can -through dreams or even daydreams- influence one’s external reality.

The confirmation that this indeed is so has come from the people who are these days involved in asking the deep questions about man, the world and the universe: the theoretical physicists.In chapter one we saw how man, these days, is considered to play a vital role in the way the universe unfolds. This has become known as the ‘participatory’ model of the universe, rather than the ‘observational’ one of Rène Descartes and Isaac Newton, and up to now experimental evidence in the field of sub-atomic physics seems to uphold the validity of this, newer, model.

This raises more questions than it answers. Man is a vital part of the universe only because he can interact with it in through means we have yet to discover. Clearly, there must be some sort of hidden mechanism at work that permits this interaction to take place. This is where dreams come in.

I Dreamt a Dream

2007-04-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

The magical tradition, of course, has a long history of paying attention to dreams.In the ancient world dreams were treated with respect. They were generally held as indicators of the future and regarded as channels through which the ‘gods’ communicated with man, though it was recognised that not all dreams were significant.

Because not a few of these dreams seemed to play a vital part in shaping affairs of the State and because there was a certain degree of interest in their interpretation they were one of the magician’s stocks-in-trade and many manuals were written to aid those who wanted to discover their import.

A quick look through history will reveal that the most influential of these manuals was Oneirocritica which was written by an itinerant ‘wise man’ from Asia Minor, called Artemidorous, in AD 140. The same manual was translated into Italian and appeared in Venice in the 16th century, and into English under the title The Judgement of Dreams which was reprinted in 1518. It sold so well that by 1772 it had gone through twenty editions!

Such is the popular fascination with dreams and their interpretations that not even the New World with its avowed faith in the practical could not long resist their allure. The first dream interpretation textbook published in America was called The New Book of Knowledge. Surprisingly perhaps, it came out in staid and boring Boston in 1767 and it proved immensely popular. Not long afterwards, back in Britain, in Glasgow, was started a tradition that saw the establishing of the popular almanac. A publication which, in a slightly modified form, has persisted to this day.

The popular rage for dream interpretation aside, however, magicians treated dreams with respect for entirely different reasons. The dream world was often called “The High Country of the Mind” and all too often a dream was likened to an unconscious vision.

Dreams, magicians reasoned, were representations of other worlds, very much like our own but also different. And for a lack of any other explanation, they thought these other worlds could be nothing but the abode of ‘spirits’ and ‘gods’. Worlds which man could tread in only with his mind.Such belief seems preposterous only in retrospect. Magicians in the past were the psychologists and psychiatrists of their day. Their knowledge of, and experimentation with, psychedelic drugs provided them with a body of experience concerning the workings of the brain and mind, which though couched in mystical and religious terms as it was, was nonetheless experimentally sound.

They were aware, for instance, of the fact that certain chemical substances contained in hemlock, foxglove, deadly nightshade and jimson weed (all ritually used in magical rituals, at one time or another, and all rich in an alkaloid based, brain protein called atropine that can induce hallucinations of flying) altered the way the senses perceived the ordinary world. They intuitively knew that the mind was far more than the sum of its parts and they could sense that the mechanism governing dreams was one that could act as a gateway to entirely different realities, though not all the time.

What magicians did not know, but suspected, was that the mind’s ability to shape reality, in order to work, required total suspension of disbelief. And to produce that they created the many physically exhausting, hypnotic almost, rituals that were designed to wear the analytical part of the brain out, and allow the power of implicit belief that is governed by the unconscious, to surface.

In the Trois Frères caves, in the south of France, is perhaps the most famous prehistoric recorded example of ancient man’s intuitive belief in the power of the mind. In the deepest part of the cave, above a high rock ledge approximately twelve feet up from the cave floor, is the picture of a man wearing an animal’s skin and tail. An owlish-looking mask and the antlers of a stag adorn his head.

This tradition of becoming a ‘part’ of nature by mimicking its attributes, in this case acquiring the strength of a stag and the wisdom of an owl, is so old that its beginnings can be traced as far back as the earliest recorded signs of the emergence of man. However crude, the technique represented by this ancient painting may be, it is nonetheless effective. Mimicry and ritual tend to hypnotise the mind and give rise to a non-judgemental sense of belief that is accompanied by chemical and physiological changes similar to those attained by trance-mediums, mystics and yogis. History abounds with references to ordinary men and women who have fought harder, ran faster and gone for days without food and water without suffering significantly ill effects simply because they believed that they could do it.

More recently, scientific experiments involving statistical analysis; random predictions and ESP indicate that there clearly exists a mechanism in the mind (and the placebo effect in medicine is the best documented case of its effectiveness) that has the power to transform or at least nudge ‘reality’ a little towards the desired path. And that mechanism may be the very same one involved in dreams.

The Power of Dreams

2007-04-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

We all dream when we are asleep and quite a few of us dream when awake. Despite what productivity experts may say, there’s nothing wrong with a little innocent daydreaming. It relaxes the mind, gives vent to whatever suppressed feelings or emotions we may have bottled up and even leaves us feeling a little refreshed at times. But in a universe where man is, in a manner of speaking, the centre of all things and where everything has been created, as we saw, for our benefit, there is no such thing as an innocent activity.

Cosmologists say we are supposed to be here, we may even have some sort of ultimate purpose which we have yet to discover. The entire fabric of creation, we are told, from the friendly star Sol to the tiniest glimmer in the coldest reaches of space, has been created so we can perceive it with our superior minds.

And when those minds are engaged in dreaming, either passively -late at night- or actively -during the day- the implications are bound to be far more than a little innocent escapism ‘dreamed up’ by the unconscious.

Now, everything I’m going to propose and all the theories which have been put forward from either magicians or physicists, depend upon a single, simple fact. Whatever the mind does, whatever activity it is engaged in, or undertakes, is part of the physical world. That is to say that no matter how complex and inexplicable any mental activity may seem to be, it is nonetheless governed by the same physical laws that dictate that an apple will fall if you release it from a height and that the toast will burn in the morning, if you leave it in the toaster too long.

Up to now I have used the term mind loosely, without bothering to define it as a distinct entity from the brain. Although this issue is not simple at all, it is outside the present scope of our discussion, so for simplicity’s sake I shall use an analogy that’s very much in vogue these days and say that for the time being we shall let the brain be a computer (i.e. the hardware or wetware as it is more commonly called) and treat the mind as the programming or software that is ran by the brain.

To get back to my argument though, by acknowledging that the mind operates within the framework of the physical world we immediately do away with the reek of the supernatural when it comes to considering any phenomena associated with it.

Anything supernatural, by definition, is an interventionary force from the outside (whatever that outside may be). It is not part of our universe and it is not subject to the same laws as we are and although in the past a supernatural agency has been invoked (primarily by magicians but also by some of the earlier scientists) in order to explain phenomena and events that lay outside their current breadth of knowledge, I firmly believe that any such entity, if it exists, can neither easily enter our universe nor comfortably function within it.

Every living thing is suited to its particular environment. People walk on land and use lungs to breathe in air, fish live in an aquatic environment and filter water through their gills. Water is part of our planet (7/10 of it at least) so, in a manner of speaking, it is also part of our environment. And yet we cannot very easily adapt to it without extensive use of our technology. If we were to enter a universe the natural laws of which are different from our own, to survive, we would need the technical ability to manipulate the laws of a nature totally alien to our own. As we cannot even begin to imagine what that nature may be like, to suggest that yes, we could possibly some day develop such capability, although probable is clearly not very realistic.

In a similar manner, anything which comes from outside our Universe would find it next to impossible to function (provided it could survive) in an environment so alien to its nature.

Having thus discounted the supernatural and along with it the miraculous, whatever remains, however improbable (to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes) must be of this world.What does all this have to do with dreams?

Quite a lot really, for according to one scientific theory dreams are real and according to another it is we who are the dream and yet a third suggests that we can dream our reality into being!

The anthropocentric universe Part IV (Man, The Universe and Everything)

2007-04-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Hawking holds Newton’s chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. It is in his capacity as the world’s leading cosmologist and theoretical physicist however that he holds in thrall the public imagination.

Now, unfortunately, for the last twenty years, Hawking has been confined to a wheel chair, the victim of a potentially fatal motor-neuron disease known as Lou Gehring’s disease. While his body is trapped, Hawking’s mind is free to roam, and its playground is the furthest reaches of the Galaxy.

There are certain clarifications that have to be made about looking back into the heart of the Galaxy. Because of the physical limitations imposed by the finite speed of light; looking back in space, is akin to looking back in time. The implication is that if we look back far enough we will, eventually, be able to determine the beginnings of the universe and theological considerations aside, examine the initial conditions that eventually begot us.

The problem is that the light we can detect with our best optical instruments and the radiation our satellite dishes can gather has been so weakened by the distance it has had to travel that the readings we get depend for final analysis upon man’s oldest instrument: the brain.

And this is where Hawking comes into his own. The shortcomings of his physical condition not withstanding, his brain, is one of the finest in the world, and when he talks, people listen, scientists amongst them.

Hawking is a proponent of modern science’s version of Bolus’ microcosmic man, known as the Anthropic Principle. In its simplest form the Anthropic Principle states that the universe is a statistical possibility of infinite potential. It also states that the potential of the universe is always achieved, so that the universe evolves along every possible path you can imagine.

The crunch, of course, comes when you consider life (mainly us), evolving in that universe. The Anthropic Principle states that the evolution of life can, statistically speaking, occur only in a certain, limited number of regions in an otherwise chaotic and infinite universe. What this means of course is that the universe and everything else we observe around us appear to have been tailor-made just for us.

If for instance the electric charge possessed by the electron that is found revolving around the nucleus of atoms had been slightly different, if the cores of the stars burnt just a little faster or a tiny bit slower or if the distribution of molecular carbon in the galaxy was not what it is now, you, I and the rest of the world would have never existed.

Were Hawking to be asked, at the intergalactic party at the edge of the Universe, “Why is the universe the way we see it?” he would glibly answer “If it had been different, we would not be here!”And that in a nutshell is what Bolus, in his own way, had said. It was all right for the gods to originate all these spheres of influence, but in order to have some sort of meaning, those spheres had to culminate in something, and that something was man.

Both Bolus and Hawking used the same instruments to guide them in their analysis: a strong sense of intuition and a fine intellect. The difference lies in 3,000 years of development in which our advanced technology has permitted us to cast our eye as far back in time as ten thousand million years ago.

We no longer believe that the gods ordered and originated perfectly circular spheres of influence, but as we shall see, just as cosmology has come to re-examine Bolus’ magical belief of man the microcosm, physics and mathematics have already laid the groundwork for the scientific explanation of sympathetic or corresponding magic. As a result, the advances made in statistical mathematics and clinical psychology have given us the means to explain just how potent is the power of dreams. More importantly, perhaps, they have succeeded in showing us what we must do in order to achieve their promise.

The anthropocentric universe Part III (We Know What You Will Do Next)

2007-04-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Not everybody likes parties though and the possibility I entertained earlier, of a party at the edge of the universe ever coming off, was almost quashed between the 17th and late nineteenth century.

The culprits of course were scientists (rather than magicians, who are known to love a party anywhere) and the reason for their efforts in this direction lies, not in any killjoy trait in the scientific character (though this has been an oft aired accusation in the past) but in the fact that scientists, like the rest of humanity, like to face their universe with a certain degree of certainty.

And certainty is just what the Newtonian model of a mechanical, totally deterministic universe offered. Based on the original observations of the motion of a pendulum bob made in 1583 by the Italian astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and natural philosopher was able to formulate the laws governing the fundamental behaviour of bodies in motion.

The principles of The Motion of Bodies was published in 1687 in Newton’s work Principia (Lat. Principles) and came to be known as Newtonian mechanics. When scientists saw that Newton’s laws of mechanics could be applied to just about any moving object in the universe and give a very good approximation of the result, they saw no reason why this could not be so in any direction in time and space.

Thus, after studying the behaviour of any physical object during an instant in time, scientists became confident that not only could they then ‘magically’ predict what was going to happen at any other given instant in the future by extrapolating its behaviour, but they could also tell exactly what had happened in the past. What’s more, unlike any other form of magic, they could do so with -what they then believed was- a terrific degree of precision.

The philosophical basis of this rigourously deterministic model of the universe had been laid more than forty years earlier by the fundamental division between ‘I’, the observer, and the observed world outside, introduced by the French philosopher and mathematician Réne Descartes in 1644.

Descartes believed in the existence of an independent, absolute world that had nothing to do with the senses. To hark back to my earlier example then, the description of a party, any party, given by a person became the definitive description of that party. The rationale was that since the party had an independent existence, totally removed from the observer; then the description the observer gave would be identical in every way to the description given by any other observer, including the host.

Now, those of us who have tried to gatecrash a party and have been found out, know this is not true. At the time however it did seem true to many and another French mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace, gave what is perhaps the clearest expression of the world that was emerging.“An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature,” he said, “and the position of all things of which the world consists -supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Setting a trend that’s remained to this day then, scientists proceeded to take over the jobs of court astrologers and fortune tellers and relegated both the former and the latter into the dustbin of history.The universe, they argued, is totally deterministic.

Free will is illusory, God (if he exists) is reduced to turning the pages to a play that’s already been written and man, far from being the centre of things, is consigned to mouthing the empty lines of character actors.

The attraction of such a soulless universe, devoid of the life, vitality and dynamism of the magical model, was that within its framework predictions could be made that were accurate. If not quite as accurate as those envisaged by Laplace at least accurate to within a very tolerable standard.Not surprisingly magicians fell out of favour. Their definition of a vague, uncertain world which required their constant mediation to keep things in line, was suddenly out of fashion.

If the fact that man had very suddenly been marginalised and the validity of free will disputed, left a sour taste in the mouth, it was made a little more palatable by the promise that very soon every mystery of Nature that had remained hidden would now become known. The very concept of the existence of a soul was now at best trivialised and at worst doubted. After all the soul could neither be directly observed nor its actions exactly predicted and to many scientists, the claim that there did exist one, smacked of ignorance and superstition. It was seen as the direct result of man’s inability to explain the reasons behind his own actions. The soul was then discarded, but given enough hard data and information everything else would be made to fit into this grandiose clockwork of the universe; including, some scientists claimed, those quirky behavioural traits that were used as the basis for the existence of a soul.

Given enough information, they argued, the behaviour and thoughts of every individual, from the buying of this book to attending a party in a distant part of the universe, could be accurately predicted. In a mechanistic universe it is possible to create the ultimate police state where the actions of every individual could be mapped out and analysed even before that individual undertook those actions. In other words not only would they (whoever ‘they’ would have turned out to be) know what you would do next, they would also know why. This is possible because in the eyes of the proponents of the mechanistic universe we are all reduced to the status of machines, albeit complicated ones, and our behaviour is equally determinable. In a short space of time, the proponents of hard science continued, not only would there be no place for anything in the least magical, in this universe, but the nature of science would also drastically change as everything that could possibly happen would be predicted and everything that could possibly exist would then be known. All man had to do was develop powerful enough and large enough, information processing capabilities. These capabilities, presumably, would copy the ideal model of the universe and take the form of more and more complex machines.

Thus, in the span of a relatively short time science managed to become not only the first profession to successfully do away with magic, but also the very first one to wish to try to do away with its own job!

Fortunately for all concerned things did not exactly work out that way. The universe may appear to run like a clockwork, but no amount of information collecting is capable of determining what will happen next. And as quantum mechanics came to show, in the early 1920s, the very act of collecting information changes the state of being of the object being observed thus adding to its indeterminacy.

Electrons for example, revolving around atomic nuclei are hazy clouds of probability and you can either know their velocity or know their momentum but never both accurately enough to allow you to predict a distinct instant in space and time when an electron will manifest out of the electronic cloud of its indeterminacy and appear as a distinct, concrete, entity.

Even the component parts of the atomic nucleus itself, the protons and the neutrons, are now perceived as constantly vibrating, empty space bounded by their form.

Science’s brief flirtation with a totally predictable universe, and its accompanying put-down, was not without benefits however. The best thing to come out of that era are a couple of very useful theories formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his American counterpart John Bell, which tellingly show why the universe can never be truly deterministic even if at times it appears to behave that way, and which we will look at later.

It wasn’t long after the introduction of quantum mechanics which successfully explained the behaviour of the universe at a microscopic level, that the clockwork universe was perceived for what it was, a useful approximation, but no more.

Magic was suddenly back in vogue and those who cared to could, once more, entertain the notion of a party at the edge of the universe, without having to worry that their every decision and thought would be predicted in advance by an alien operating a super-powerful computer.

The anthropocentric universe Part II (The Center of Attention)

2007-04-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Now, I like parties as much as the next man. And I enjoy them even more when they are being held in my honour and people pay attention to me not because of anything I’ve said or done, but simply because I’m there.

If a grand, humdinger of a party were to be held in an otherwise quite corner of the Universe and all life forms were to be invited, including man, then I can tell you now that all eyes (and other alien sensory organs) would be upon us, for we would be the centre of attention at that party, simply for being there.

Before you get me wrong, I must hasten to add that looks will have nothing to do with all the interest we will generate. The reason we will be honoured and paid lavish attention to, is none other than the fact that if not for us, the Universe, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

You may find this piece of information a little strange and rather hard to come to grips with, but it is in fact a contention countenanced by a great many cosmologists and physicists including Britain’s own Stephen Hawking.

All this has come about from science’s attempts to answer the question “Why are we here?”. Now, there’s nothing very new about this question. It has been asked before and a rather mediocre philosopher and wizard named Bolus of Mendes, an Egyptian who lived in Hellenistic Greece in 200 BC, wrote a book trying to answer just that.Bolus’ book became a best-seller, sparking off a minor revolution in the magical circles of its time. Its message was so intuitive and so simple that it probably predated its formal statement by several hundred thousand years.

What Bolus wrote was that man was a microcosm or ‘little world’ and that within him he contained, on a somewhat smaller scale, all the levels of being in the Universe. Wizards in Bolus’ time visualised the Universe as being spherical, comprised of an almost endless array of ever narrowing concentric spheres that began with the gods and narrowed down to planet Earth. Now Bolus placed man squarely in the centre of that fixture, able to influence anything he chose to direct his attention to.

That was about 3,000 years ago and it became the basis for the tradition of sympathetic or corresponding magic; according to which great effects can be set in motion simply by activating their corresponding element on Earth, which in turn will activate its corresponding element in the next sphere and so on. Before you laugh, remember that every time you touch wood to ward off bad luck, while surrounded by the high-tech fruits of 20th century technology, you too become part of that tradition. Wood was sacred in the ancient world for its ability to float on water and burn in fires. It was vital for building shelters against the elements, keeping oneself warm, and as a raw material for tools, implements and amulets! To the minds of the people it was both alive and dead, it could grow out of the ground and attain great size but its death did not diminish it. By touching wood then, they evoked the life-force of the spirit that lived in it.

I’m not suggesting that we all start wearing amulets and worship trees, but there are, often little understood urges in us, which account for the grip of superstition on our minds. By the same token, magic, and science today, enjoy a similarly strong grip.Modern science can, of course, now produce theories which are a little more refined than your average magical one. To thank for this we have the unstinting efforts of Francis Bacon, an English mathematician and one time Lord Chancellor to James I, who in the early 17th century with the intention of becoming a “second Aristotle” argued for the establishment of the experimental method which has become the basis of the scientific approach. Beneath all the dressing, however, the messages science has to give us today are restatements of theories wizards and magicians have championed since the dawn of history and they hark back upon a past where, as we shall see, intuition was the sole guiding principle.

The anthropocentric universe Part I

2007-04-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

Today, when scientists talk people listen. For many people science has taken on the mantle formerly worn by religion. It promises salvation from a great many of life’s problems and claims to offer the only possible way to save the planet from its inevitable, looming fate, which has been brought on by the bad management of our natural resources, overcrowding and the excesses of...yes, science.

It would not be wrong to assume, when listening to scientists, that the future is going to present few problems science will not effectively be able to deal with, and as long as we keep supplying scientists with tax-dollars, we have little to worry about. Yet, we have been down that road before. There was a time when tithes supported the researches of alchemists, necromancers, astrologers and wizards, and it was they who stood beside Kings and Heads of State, rather than the Science Advisers we see today.

The picture of the poor alchemist or lone magician bent over his work, supported by his meagre earnings as he quests for Truth and Knowledge, has as much countenance as that of the lone scientist setting up a laboratory in his basement or town-house garage.

To be honest there were some astrologers, alchemists and wizards who toiled on alone, as there are today certain scientists who choose to go down that route, James Lovelock (of the Gaia theory fame) being a prime example, but the reason for their position tends to be more the nature of the individual pursuit of their studies than the effect of their calling.Magicians who dabbled with the conjuration of devils in the past, were naturally not in as great a demand as those who specialised in casting horoscopes and divining where wells lay. Scientists who choose to champion an unpopular area of research today are cut off from the fold and have, therefore, to strike out on their own.

But no one, given half a chance, will not choose to be part of the mainstream, and the mainstream like a self-regulatory free market mechanism, dictates (for ill or good) what the general thrust of the discipline will be.

Cynical as this may sound to those who think that science (like magic, once) is ruled by high ideals and a thirst for knowledge, it is nonetheless true and it works in a more or less desirable direction, as it tends to guide magicians and scientists alike towards an area of study useful to those who employ them. After all, he who pays the piper, invariably, calls the tune.#

So, scientists today hold the awe of the masses, not least because they tread in areas of thought that fascinate everybody but which few people are properly equipped to explore themselves. Not surprisingly, when scientists talk, they also couch their language behind a thicket of jargon reminiscent of secret initiation rites and use symbols which to the untrained eye may as well be runes. Does all this sound familiar?

Scientists don’t yet say abracadabra, but I have heard them speak of “the transmutation potential of morphogenic field phenomena on the inverse wave interface.” The reason I’m not impressed by such things anymore is because I have heard the explanations and they are far from impressive (like the one above referring to a change in the weather!).Science (which originally, in true market-forces style, sprang from a branch of magic) has today cornered the ‘Explanations about the Universe’ market and is seeking to monopolise our trust. In the face of the decline of the power of religion, the erosion of social institutions, the uncertainty of new values and mores and the constant thirst for answers that is the hallmark of man, science has certainly caught our attention.

Books on popular science (not unlike what I am writing here one) now vie in sales with fiction best-sellers. The promises of scientists about the security of the future sound like the hawking of elixirs promising to cure all ills and the vying for attention, prestige, and research money bring to mind the Hapsburg court in Austria and its armies of astrologers, or the Senate of Rome and its attendant priests who were at hand to read the entrails of sacrificed animals.

Now, it may sound like I object to all this. Far from it. I admire what science has achieved to date and applaud the brave, new concepts put forward for the future. But at the same time we should keep things in a certain perspective. None of this is really ‘new.’ Nor has science just ‘discovered’ terrific new insights that will permanently change the nature of man’s interaction with the Cosmos.

Like I said earlier, we have been down that road before. And one only needs to listen carefully to realise that science today is in the business of rediscovering rather than discovering, very much like the time of the Renaissance that was sparked off in Italy and which rediscovered the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, restated it, and then claimed it for its own.

To be sure, science is an exciting field to be working in today. The bespectacled, white lab-coated, boring stereotype of the scientist, if it was ever true, has gone the way of the dodo. Scientists today have to be as good at presenting their theories as they are at formulating them; this means that they must have a little of the showman in them; and this, unfortunately, attracts not a few charlatans to the profession.

Over the last few years, as the money has become scarcer, either because there are that many more scientists chasing after it, or else because there are other demands, just as legitimate and often far more pressing being made upon it, the clamour and the claims have got louder.

It is necessary then, to sort the facts from the hype and listen carefully to what these ‘new’ scientists are saying about their achievements to date, their theories, and the world we will all soon be inhabiting.

Introduction to both science and magic

2007-04-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

When I was training as a chemical engineer, science offered very few opportunities for heresy. Science was, even then, an exciting field in which one could hope to practise a profession, but it was also a serious business.

I suppose it was a little like High Magic. Laymen weren’t expected to understand it; all that mattered were the results not the process and everyone held scientists in a kind of quite awe.

The latter was mostly because no one was quite sure what scientists did. There was the suspicion (advanced at cocktail parties after the punch had finished) that scientists made bombs.

Some would even go so far as to intimate that scientists were not the most sane of people one could know. Which was laughable given the fact that, at the time, it taxed the imagination to think of anyone less sane and strait-laced than a scientist.

The profession simply did not encourage colourful personalities, and anything that could not be rigourously proven was never even thought about, let alone mentioned in public.

Pretty sombre staff all round, but the popular image of scientists in white lab coats, sporting hairdos that befitted music composers and orchestra conductors, persisted.

Inevitably, as the evening wore on and the punch sunk lower out would come the party-joke imitation of the archetypal genius (who always happened to be portrayed as a scientist). And in direct contrast, the more serious and quiet science looked, the more the jokes persisted.

Today the awe, if anything, has intensified. These days however practically everyone knows what it is that scientists do and, more to the point, everyone is aware of the fact that modern society has taken the form it has because of the advances (and underlying principles) of science.

The odd thing about all this is that modern science is only about 500 years old. Far too young to hold this kind of influence, you may say. I wouldn’t disagree. We’ve been on this planet long enough not to be swayed by so young a discipline. The bedrock this discipline stands on, however, has been with us since the very emergence of our species and although it has not been called so, it is in fact, mankind’s oldest form of science.

Long before we had our chemists and our physicists, we’d had our shamans; our witches, wizards and alchemists. Their methods may have been a little unorthodox but their ultimate aim was the same: to find a way to give man control over Nature.

Science today has done that and more. Where wizards once entertained visions of flying, Concorde jets scythe through the air at speeds twice that of sound. The dream of universal telepathy has fallen to the miracle of the telephone which, in turn, has given way to the fax machine and the PC network. Anyone of us can, through the use of technology today, achieve almost anything magicians of the past ever hoped to be able to do.

Today’s scientists dream of reactivating dead cells, engineering human genes, travelling in time using biogravitational wormholes, constructing singularities in space and gaining absolute control over matter. Funnily enough the archetypal jokes have dried up. Given its claims you may say that in its progress science has drawn inspiration from its own unique set of dreamers: the science-fiction writers.

Progress however is a strange thing. The more it advances and the more things it has to cope with, the more general the assumptions of the science that drives it must be and the more that science must expand and grow.

It is a vicious circle of sorts, with no end in sight. Trying to cope with the constant demands our lifestyle makes upon the science that put this lifestyle on its present path, science has had to reach not only the heights of science-fiction but also the depths of magic.

Facing questions about Man, Time and the Universe, today’s scientists are looking far back in time, to the beliefs of their magical counterparts and, behind the hype, they are finding wisdom!There are distinct parallels to be drawn between the philosophical teachings of Magic and the theoretical sorties of modern science, sometimes so much so that in a slightly unnerving way today’s consummate magicians are scientists. Where once wizards talked of creating ethereal slave-spirits called familiars, to guide and advise them, today we stand on the threshold of the bodiless, omniscient, entity: The Artificial Intelligence.

Where once magicians faced persecution for trying to create their own version of life today there is talk of genetic engineering and artificially designed life forms. These are overt similarities and crude by necessity. At a different level every human discipline has required a set of fundamental principles that form its guiding paradigms. And it is here, at this level, that the true similarities are to be found.

Having turned its gaze upon subjects that also once interested magic, modern science has found that the beliefs of yesteryear are only narrowly removed from the facts uncovered by experimental evidence in the here and now.

It’s needless to say that no one talks of mad scientists anymore at the parties I go to. Cutting-edge science today, has caught the public imagination like never before and scientists these days are celebrities in their own right.

Their individual fields of study and the advances they have made are so many that even their fellow scientists find it difficult to keep up preferring instead to concentrate only on those aspects of science of immediate interest to them. Likewise, following a hallowed tradition, the topics I have chosen to present you in the next few pages follow neither rhyme nor reason apart from the fact that they lie close to my heart. Collectively they deal with the fundamental aspects of intelligence, consciousness, life, the nature of reality and the very fabric of the universe.

But in a world where science has began to replace almost every aspect of magic, the same themes could (appropriately enough) be broached no matter which topic I had chosen to examine. By choosing the ones I did I’m hoping to give you an idea of the on-going process of investigation of the unknown in all its forms that was the basis of magic and has now become the cornerstone of science.

To achieve clarification I have purposely left all scientific jargon (and equations) out of the book, but a comprehensive, further reading list at the end will point you in the right direction if you wish to further investigate any of the claims outlined here.

I hope you have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it. And if we should ever meet at a party by a half-empty bowl of punch well, you can then let me know.

In the posts to come I will cover it all. ESP, metaphysics, Out-of-body experiencs, Kirlian photography and the proverbial partidge on the pear tree :).

Stay tuned for my daily posts.