The Crack in the Cosmic Egg

by Joseph Chilton Pearce

  David Bohm rejects "eternal forms" as well as randomness or strict causal laws. He holds that all things are interconnected and influenced by contingencies with all other things, traceable to so remote an interrelation that they may be considered chance for all practical purposes. To associative causes and contingencies Bohm adds the element of satisfying necessary relationships. Opposing and contradictory motions are the rule throughout the universe, he believes, an essential aspect of the very mode of things. The existence of anything is made possible by a balancing of contingent and opposing processes. These very processes will tend to change a thing in various directions, and eventually always will change it.

  In Bohm's "Natural Law" there is no limit to the new kinds of things that can come into being, to the number of transformations, both qualitative and quantitative that can occur. This echoes Whitehead's "structure of evolving processes," and brings to mind Carington's theory that an idea tends to realize itself in any way it can unless inhibited by opposing ideas.

  Teilhard spoke of a "biological change of state" terminating in thought, a comparatively recent development in evolution, and affecting life itself in its "organic totality" on the entire planet. I think, too, of Jung whose "unconscious contents" were always in a process of new combinations and syntheses.

  Bohm's "natural law" is of a "nature" shot through and through with the mind of man. Thinking is the most important of all the "necessary relations" that must be satisfied. Singer mused that the philosophical method might have a share in determining the nature of change. An energetic focus of thought weighs heavily as a determinant among the contingencies in any context. To focus is to narrow to a specific, to agree on a single aspect in an infinitely contingent possibility. The wider the agreement, the wider the context influenced. In oder to achieve focused agreement there must be a nucleus of ideas around which the participants -- and possibilities -- can organize. The ideas come first. The mythos leads the logos.

  Bohm writes that scientific history is full of examples in which it was fruitful to assume that certain objects or elements might be real long before any procedures were known that would permit them to be observed directly. The atomic theory, a subject very near to our lives, is the best example.

  According to tradition, Leucippus and Democritus first proposed an atomic theory, some two thousand years ago, though Singer says they got the idea from the Pythagoreans. Though abandoned in that great "failure of nerve" suffered in those waning years of antiquity, the notion never completely died. Atomic views were coming to the fore again in Galileo's day, stimulated by discoveries of the microscope. A considerable philosophical literature on the subject grew, now largely forgotten since it led to nothing dramatic, but the curiosity it aroused had a decided influence in "directing the biological observation" of the generations that followed.

  Newton incorporated atoms in Question 31 of his Optiks. The whole subject was very much in the common domain before Dalton moved the idea directly to the fore of tangibles by postulating the existence of individual atoms to explain the various large-scale regularities, such as the laws of chemical combination, the gas laws, and so on. Dalton gave the old idea new life by drawing up a hypothetical table of atomic weights, treating the imaginary things as actualities and giving them a real place in the sun. Putting things on paper, backing them with mathematical correlations, relating them to the basic stuff of the world, proves to be a strong catalytic tonic.

  It was possible to treat these large-scale regularities of gasses directly in terms of macroscopic concepts alone, without the introduction of new notions. Certain nineteenth century positivists, notably Mach, insisted on purely philosophical grounds that the concept of atoms was meaningless and nonsensical because it was not then possible to observe them as such -- and, indeed, by their very nature they could never be observed. Nevertheless, Bohm points out, evidence for the existence of individual atoms was eventually discovered by people who took the atomic hypothesis seriously enough to suppose that atoms might exist, even though no one had actually observed them.

  James B. Conant claims that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts. Certainly the contradictory facts for atoms were many and severe. But the "questions" had been asked, and a long series of believers set about directly and indirectly contributing to the gathering of material for the answer. The unfolding history covered many generations and gives a fine example of the question-answer function in cultural form, moving over many lives, a cultural drift taking on power and characteristics. That people took the idea seriously enough was the key.

  Only a sustained passionate belief could have leaped the logical gap between that "imagined," created within the mind's eye, imaged from possibility in spite of the lack of sensory evidence, and the final answer, translated into reality through enormous expenditures of time, effort, group belief, money, and with even the passionate urgency of war to hasten its final birth.

  Interestingly enough, Newton's laws of motion could not cover the new atoms, and the emerging postulates of Einstein and Planck shook the early twentieth-century physicists who had felt satisfied with the world system long since discovered and formulated. Weaver mentions how the new ideas recharged all the scientific fields. Journals and learned magazines which were thin and anemic burgeoned into fat and exciting adventures in every issue.

  Today atomicity is the energy basis of all things, commonplace, taken for granted. Newton's cosmic egg has been expanded enormously, but resealed with splendid logic. Now we see the current egg as an a priori structure. This always was, this is the way the sun works, billions of years of development were involved, this is the very underpinning of all things.

  Was this a breakthrough of Pauli's "cosmic order"? Was it a truth glimpsed through some temporary freeing of the cave-encompassed mind and brought back as light into our sphere? In fact, can we claim something really different and not speak madness? Yes. If we cannot see beyond this apparent chasm, we will miss something vital.

  Exploring Bohm's "qualitative infinity of nature" a bit further I found Bohm postulating that the universe may have existed, and in his system must either once have existed or necessarily will someday exist on a basis totally unrelated to atoms, molecules, and such aggregates of energy. (Gerald Feinberg cannot rule out such a possibility on purely logical grounds, but is content to wait, skeptically, for such a development. He feels we have arrived at a final understanding of the basic stuff of which our world is made.) Thus Bohm postulates his 'sub-quantum' theory of an "infinite substructure of matter." No matter how fine a breakdown of particles we ever achieve, there will be that many more -- and there is always the possibility of their eventual reorganization in non-molecular atomic form.

  Where, then, would be the cosmic order? Or is it not also a process , a process of change and possibility? Are both men, Bohm and Pauli, correct in their own ways? Is the true cosmic order some law like Bohm's that might thus, as an abstraction, always be independent of the products of its function? Wherever we are, whatever we may be, that which we are is the true and objective reality. Is that process itself a cosmic order?

  Several years before Bohm's work, Teilhard spoke of man's dream being mastery of the ultimate energy, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities. And I think of William Blake's great romantic affirmation: "More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than all will never satisfy man."

  In these poetic, quasi-religious, and scientific expressions there is a question tentatively and ever more strongly asserting itself. A seed of possibility is being planted into the continuum of potential.

  Bohm talked about new sources of energy from this "infinite process of becoming." New energy might be available even now when atoms, molecules and so on continue to exist. Bohm points out that in the last century only mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, luminous, and gravitational energies were known. Today we have at our disposal nuclear energy, a far larger reservoir of energy.

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p; Bohm then follows with a statement that creates, in effect, a kind of rudimentary shaping of the question into tighter form. For he muses that the infinite substructure of matter very probably contains energies that are as far beyond nuclear energy as that great force is beyond chemical energies.

  What follows this is both the rough formulation of a possible direction for the question to move in which will help determine the nature of the question and the basis for the first tentative steps in the gathering of materials for an answer. For Bohm next shows how, by computing the "zero point" energy due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations, something on the order of 10^38 ergs is attained in "even one cubic centimetre of space." As I wrote when citing this assertion in my first chapter, this comes out to the explosive energy of roughly ten billion tons of uranium fission.

  Bohm qualifies by saying this kind of energy provides a constant background not available under present conditions, but he dreams that, as conditions change, a part of it might be made available at our level.

  Does Bohm believe that man will wait for conditions to change in order to have new energy? Did conditions in the universe change for man's atomic age to come about? Or for the discovery and development of the laser? No. Man's conceptual level changed, and the kind of universe with which he dealt proved to be different from that of previous dealings. No amount of waiting would have ever brought about man's atomic age naturally. There is no such nature.

  The evolving processes of an "infinite substructure of matter," or whatever it may be called, evolve around suggestions, ideas, and notions passionately adhered to, triggers for what might be. Eventually Bohm's postulate, or one by another Bohm or Feinberg or whoever, will formulate an equation that will break into some future mind as a Eureka! revelation. Scoffed at for lack of evidence, perhaps, it will find its passionate believers, those who simply like the notion and see it a way to their own expression, their own ambition's fulfillment. They will start driving piles into shaky ground, working out the correspondences, trying to develop a mathematics to cover all the contingencies. Some day they will make the translations, they will achieve the testings, and the results in reasonable facsimile will be produced. Then the technicians, the mechanics, the brass-tack realists who deal with the obvious and evident, will start exploiting and exhausting the possibilities -- filling in the new circles of reason.

  Max Planck once wrote that when an experimental result contradicts an existing theory in some way, progress is in sight, for the theory is even then in process of being changed and improved. Consider then, the discovery of that tiny 'quasar' (i.e. seemingly a stellar object) 3C-273. Pouring through it, or from it, or something, is energy enough to power up to 1000 times the usual sized galaxy like our Milky Way. At least, that was the estimate in 1965, when Dr. Herbert Friedman, head of the Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division of the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory, reported on it, saying that the release of such energy fits nothing in modern physics at all, and that we may be witnessing an entirely new souroe of energy.

  Since then pulsars have been discovered, which apparently incorporate an energy far exceeding the speed-of-light limit demanded by the Einsteininn universe in which we live at present. These new phenomena have triggered off an immense excitement of speculation. Probably no single topic in decades has stimulated such an outpouring of theorizing among astronomers, physicists, and men of all the sciences. Each month the new offerings come forward in large quantity.

  Consider now that ideas of radical energies were assumed as a matter of course by Teilhard, back in the 1940's before development of the hydrogen bomb. Bohm's proposal was published in 1957, about four years before the great quasar show began. Indeed, Bohm's notion and quasar 3C-273 seem made for each other. At any rate, it is not simple fortuitousness that these ideas were in the domain before people began to "see" quasars and pulsars.

  Teilhard saw thought "artificially perfecting" the thinking instrument itself. We rebound forward under the collective effect of our reflection. And, he prophesied, we foster the dream of that "energy of which all other energies are merely servants." Teilhard saw mankind "grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world."

  Do you not see that our Catholic paleontologist and our Jewish physicist, each in his own sphere, explore the same capacity for potential, funneled through their prism of prejudice, their molds for world-making, and their heart's desire? Can we do other than acknowledge Blake's dictum from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "The Worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God."

  Bohm searches beneath the quantum ; Jung talks of the psyche speaking about the psyche; Teilhard said the Great Stability is not at the bottom, in the infra-elementary sphere of quantums and their sub-levels, but at the top, in the ultra-synthetic sphere of thought. They are all really talking about the same process, for at some point along the way the categories dissolve and things merge.

  Teilhard claimed that what is "spontaneously psychical" is no longer merely an "aura around the soma," but a part, even a principal part, of the phenomenon. Intellectual synthesis is no longer speculation, he speculated, but is creation.

  Now the passion, the belief, the imagination, the intuitive analysis, and the insight that brought about the logical gap that could then be leapt to bring into being man's atomic age were all psychic phenomena. Imagination and idea preceded, and in fact created, this new age which is, in turn, transforming and reshaping the whole of our reality. We are the determinant, the prism that shapes inner and outer into a meaningful pattern that is the only reality we shall ever know.

  David Bohm's idea, or a compatible equivalent, as H-bombs or atomic generating stations are at best rather strained equivalents of Democritus' idea, may eventually produce its own structure. Infinite changes are taking place as consciousness enters into contingencies, altering courses, searching for a way to interpret, to broaden, to explore.

  At our present rate, who dares suggest how far this interference might extend in, say, another century. That attractive seizing of the tiller is there -- perhaps cloaked as 10^38 ergs. Surely it does not exist ; there is no such animal except as a dream-figure in some physicist's creative mind.

  Yet from there it will be translated, sooner or later, into reality. And the reality into which it will be translated will be a reality that has, itself, been translated, or transformed, into terms compatible with the new desire. The "ecological" satisfactions demanded by the new idea and its radiating contingencies will somehow be met. The vast network of our reality will make adjustments for inclusion and support of the new concept. The infinite process of change will have its logical, normal, and reasonable working out. The action of psyche and 'physis' will have gone full circle.

  Then, at that point, the new will become obvious. We will say: "Why, of course. This is the way the universe works. This is the real secret of the sun, and the stars. This was obviously a priori, for its processes involve billions of years. We simply never had the proper tools, the proper insight, we did not understand the Laws."

  Laws there will be, and the only breaking of them will be through that crack-forming procedure. What we will have loosed on earth will have been loosed in heaven. Theologians will grudgingly admit, in a kind of sour-grapes way: that the scientists have discovered more of God's eternal secrets by which He built the universe. And the laws will be "true" ones, of the only truth there can be. They will be universal. They will reflect the cosmic order. They will be the underpinnings of the very ground on which we stand. The level between our idea and the resultant fact will be difficult to assess, for the very ground from which the assessment must be attempted will be, then as now, itself a product of the function of mirroring in question.

  6 fire-burn

  In the Atlantic Monthly of May, 1959, appeared an article by Leonard Feinberg, Ph.D., University of Illinois, on fire-walki
ng in Ceylon. Feinberg had observed several fire-walkings while serving as an officer in the South Pacific during World War II. As a Fulbright Professor to the University of Ceylon in 1956-1957, he had the opportunity to follow the full development of the chief ceremony held on that island.

  Preparations for this annual affair, held in honor of the god Kataragama, lasted three months. The applicants lived that entire time under the constant surveillance of the priests of the god, and in the main temple. It was a time of abstinence, vegetarianism, drinking only water, daily baptisms in the holy river, constant sprinklings with holy water, continual religious instruction, prayer, meditation, and communion with the god.

  It was a serious undertaking, a 24-hour a day investment of self. If the believer did all these things, he would finally achieve the proper state of mind, an absolute and unquestioning belief in Kataragama, a seizure by the god himself. Then he could walk the fire unafraid and unharmed.