Barfield compares Greek and Oriental foundations to existence:

The Western outlook is based essentially on that turning of man’s attention to the phenomena. This is sharply contrasted with the oriental impulse to refrain from the phenomena, to remain, as it were, in the bosom of the Eternal, to disregard as irrelevant to man’s true being, all that, in his experience, which is based on ‘the contact of the senses’.

 

It is clear that the way of the West lies, not back but forward; not in withdrawal from contacts of the senses, but in their transformation and redemption. (Barfield, p. 173)

Taking as starting point the literal truth of separation of subject and object, the western outlook introduces an alienating sense of the absence of participation. This leads to the apocalypse of all things gathering together a vision of nothingness in their fragmentation. In this void, a way forward is found in the apparently insignificant part played by chance. Chance becomes the key that translates nothing into existence.

Zero

The decimal numbers, in particular the zero, had come to the West in surprisingly recent history. They had been used for thousands of years before that in the East. Mathematicians such as Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta first worked with mathematical symbols and treated the zero as a number in its own right.

When Sūnya is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged and a number multiplied by Sūnya becomes Sūnya. (Brahmagupta AD 628, quoted in Barrow, p. 39)

The designation Sūnya for zero suggests the pivotal usage of the term when comparing its other meanings. Alongside emptiness or absence, Sūnya stood for:

… space, the firmament, the celestial vault, the atmosphere and ether, as well as nothing, the quantity not to be taken into account, the insignificant. (Ifrah, p. 36)

Zero was also the space developing the potential into existence. Space is the ground of becoming, without existence for itself but holding the emerging of the possible. The zero was the denying of individual existence that could still find its way to being through the collective.

Zero thus had the connotation of that which reveals the one. Nothing is truly ours. Part of our existence is the ability to fall totally out of existence. The shadow that finite existence throws over itself, is exactly what allows us to know the Divine in whatever form. Zero is acknowledged as a meaningful, essential quality that brings to the finite, the humility to know the Infinite.

The symbol zero (known as sifr) came to the Arab world through Muhammed `Abu Jafar’ ibn Musâ al-Khowârizmi in ninth century Persia.

The Italian Leonardo Fibonacci then discovered the decimal system of counting when travelling with his father who was representing Pisan traders. The book Liber Abaci begins:

While I was still a child, when I had been introduced to the art of the Indians’ nine symbols through remarkable teaching, knowledge of the art very soon pleased me above all else and I came to understand it. (Fibonacci 1202)

There was however a surprising lethargy for doing anything with the number system Fibonacci introduced into Europe. It was only with the Renaissance three hundred years later that the decimal number system took over from the cumbersome Roman numerals, even for trade. Aristotle, who knew of the Eastern way of counting, made an argument taken up later by the Church that denounced the zero as a mere idea. Only around the fifteenth century or so did it become fully accepted in the West.

One

In Greek time, number was related to the one. Aristotle says:

Every quantity is recognised as quantity through the one, and that by which quantities are primarily known [as quantities] is the one itself; therefore the one is the source of number as number. (Aristotle, in Klein, p. 53)

All concept and number are an abstract expression that follows from the essential unity of the world.

The one is the source of number as that which gives each number its character as a ‘number of …,’ thereby rendering it a ‘number’. (Klein, p. 53)

This unity innate to the world is in its essence expressed as proportion, harmony or identity. All number follows as corollary to the one that is in the world.

The whole realm of number is a progress from the unit to the infinite by means of the excess of one unit [of each successive number over the preceding]. (Domninus AD 413, 5f, in Klein, p. 52)

Thus number for the Greeks described a secondary multiplicity to the essential uniqueness of things that existed in the world. The proportions, ratios and harmonies had a practical goal in realising the aesthetic, giving form to the natural order.

The Greek one was something totally in the world. The doctrine of the one could be taken up into the understanding of Christianity, where the one was transcendent over existence. In putting emphasis on existence through the transformed one, the zero could no longer be the gateway to the Divine as it was in the East. The basis of the one that developed in modern science in quantum theory, collided head on with a doctrine that seemed closer in spirit to the Eastern idea of emptiness.

Complementarity

In the double-slit experiment described in Chapter 1, when one sees reality through the concept of a wave, one witnesses a wave-like event. Change the apparatus to catch the phenomena in its actions as a particle and one witnesses particle type behaviour of something travelling a particular path. One could make complementary lists of different pairs of concepts that could reveal different aspects of the situation. One could have a position pair of glasses or a momentum pair of glasses, but not both. As Pauli states:

One can look at the world either with the position-eye or one can look at it with the momentum-eye, but if you will simultaneously open both eyes, you get lost. (Pauli 1926)

Something bizarre has happened here. In insisting on the only reality being through the concepts, the understanding needs a further mental construct to explain why these concepts no longer provide a whole view of reality. The concept of position or momentum that was originally an invention of physics to describe objective reality, now gives one only half of the picture.

Bohr introduces a further mental construct, picked up from nowhere, the principle of complementarity to explain how the existing mental constructs no longer establish a whole view of reality:

Greenstein and Zajonc sum this up clearly as follows:

Imagine writing down the set of all true statements about a given physical situation. According to classical ideas, these statements could be written down in one big list; this list would constitute a complete description of the situation. But according to Bohr, we are required to write them on two half-lists. Furthermore, we must enter them in such a manner that to each entry on one half-list, there corresponds an entry on the other. The particle-nature of the electron goes on one half-list, its wave-nature on the other; the position of a particle on one half-list, its momentum on the other; knowledge of the path a quantum took on one, the possibility of interference on the other. Bohr’s principle of complementarity insists that we can choose either one half-list or the other – but never both. (Greenstein & Zajonc, p. 95)

This was the final irony. In order to serve the one and deny the zero, Bohr had now divided logic into two stories about existence! What we were seeing here was a fundamental negation of the premise of the hypothesis of the supremacy of the one as a basis for mathematics. In the neat way of a mathematical proof, we had shown that assuming the one to be absolute, there had to be two stories of existence, denying the original supposition.

Joining

In the East, zero or nothing was the natural reflection of a purely spiritual attainment, placing the wellspring of existence outside the content-filled material occupation of things. Nothing was simply the point of natural balance between spirituality and form. This was a reflection of the understanding that emptiness, from which form came, was dynamically accessible to the spirit.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness

Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form. (‘Heart Sutra’ from Prajnaparamita-Sutras)

In the consideration of Western science, zero is that mediating number between abstraction and expression that is able to deliver a virtual thesis about existence. The decimal system was gifted to the human intellect to know the world through reason alone. The power of nothing was still there, but its home was now the reasoning that was able to apply the concept as structure to the world of nameable things.

In the original Eastern understanding as far as this is known, the zero was a spiritual experience of travelling through a state of nothing to illumine a reality of identity behind. There were here two equally valid applications of number to the interpretation of a physical system. One was material, grasped intellectually; the other spiritual, about the nature of being.

The result of the import of numbers from the East was that zero was then considered part of a number system, an element that behaved according to the rules of addition and multiplication consistently and thus could be considered as equally real as any other quantity that was actually there.

Zero was simply the absence of any number or when included as a digit in a larger number, an empty designation for a particular power of 10. There was nothing mysterious or creative in the zero.

The contortion of western mathematics is that it tries to impose the zero-one code of arithmetic as a unique way of making sense of what is there. Rather than allowing the dynamic of zero and one to be a many-fingered weave of the fabric of structure between darkness and light.

Communicating emptiness

The problem of the use of concepts lay within the place of zero within number itself. While the East understood that emptiness and form were connected and hence the concepts of physics would have to hold the dance between unity and separation, for the west, number as abstraction has set itself up as a complete window on existence.

The notion of zero developed in the East had a profound spiritual quality to it. It was the fulcrum on which spiritual understanding could encounter the finite by surrendering to the infinite of nothing.

Bohr and Heisenberg travelled to India to meet spiritual leaders and felt vindicated in their philosophical premises by the spiritual tradition of India. Maybe they did not realise that their mathematics had its origin in just this tradition in the first place.

In 1929 Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. (Capra 1982, p. 217–18)

 

Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. (Capra 1989, p. 43)

When Bohr and Heisenberg each travelled to the East, they recognised some familiarity to their formulation of quantum theory. As HH the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom:

This rings true with quantum theory, where reality exists only in so far as it is observed. There are no fundamental entities, such as the particle, or even properties as position or momentum by themselves.

The actual teachings on emptiness imply an infinitely open space that allows for anything to appear, change, disappear, and reappear. The basic meaning of emptiness, in other words, is openness, or potential. At the basic level of our being, we are ‘empty’ of definable characteristics. (Tsoknyi Rinpoche, p. 120–21)

How clearly this paragraph changes the null connotation of emptiness with the creative sounding words of openness and potential. Potential exists independently of how we marshal it into being. To be open to the world means also that we do not prejudge anything about it, but allow the world to register its own meaning upon us.

However much Bohr and Heisenberg could intellectually grasp the meaning of emptiness as practised in the East, they were committed to providing a conceptual statement of an objective reality, as required for a western scientific establishment. Emptiness was thus included in a token ring of philosophical statement whose purpose was to safeguard the concepts science had built up in the tradition of Aristotle’s one.

Colour

The bridge between zero and one is further provided by Goethe’s work in the relation of dark and light.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), as well as being an outstanding poet and playwright, also developed a methodology about how one could constructively engage with the world of appearance. His participatory approach differs from the immediate prescription of things one can read from a common science book in requiring a commitment of the whole being. Goethe invites us to experience light where it meets darkness.

As Rudolf Steiner said:

For Goethe darkness is not the completely powerless absence of light. It is something active. It confronts the light and enters with it into a mutual interaction. Modern natural science sees darkness as a complete nothingness. According to this view, the light which streams into a dark space has no resistance from the darkness to overcome.

 

Goethe pictures to himself that light and darkness relate to each other like the north and south pole of a magnet. The darkness can weaken the light in its working power. Conversely, the light can limit the energy of the darkness. In both cases colour arises. (Steiner, 1897)

Goethe’s theory of colour was in contrast to Newton’s theory. Newton felt the colours were in the light, separated out by the prisms into their constituent elements. In this case, light is merely an abstract player and there is no inner story about its origin.

… they [Newton and others] maintained that shade is a part of light. It sounds absurd when I express it; but so it is: for they said that colours, which are shadow and the result of shade, are light itself. (Goethe as quoted in Eckerman)

For Goethe, the colours were the richness at the boundary of dark and light. To understand colour as a part of light as in Newton’s explanation, was to miss the rich quality of the in-between space of darkness and light. Colour was about the dynamic of rich event between emptiness and existence, as they played through each other.

But what had happened with science was that colour had been taken from this dynamic in-between realm and put back into the world of explanation as just an illusory by-product of properties such as wavelength. For Goethe, this explanation hid the true nature of colour, which he saw as fundamental to form.

Something similar happens with chance.

Chance

Chance is something that comes out of emptiness. Chance is not yet based on existence, even though that might be the outcome. Chance is something that happens, whose significance is provided by its relation to other events. Chance events often begin by losing oneself, having strayed from the normal path, to be redirected by an encounter with a whole quality to existence. Chance events thus stand between nothing and the unity of existence.

What Bohr and Heisenberg recognise is that quantum theory is about chance. One understands the equations by talking about the probability with which something chances to happen. But also they have the responsibility of holding up a theory that the scientific establishment shall accept. How can they just talk of chance?

The skill in the Copenhagen interpretation is to introduce subtly through the back door, the act of measurement as inseparable from the results the theory produces. Measurement confines the chances that can occur exactly to those directly quantitative outcomes that can be translated into mathematics. The theory is still about chance but now the range of events is limited to those that return a certain numerical answer.

The one thing Bohr was good at was completely disguising the meaning of what he was saying. In his papers it is difficult to pin down what he means when he gives an explanation. It is always just beyond what you think you’ve understood. He either doesn’t completely explain what he means by measurement or by complementarity, or he says it in a way in which, when you’ve read the sentence, you can’t quite get at what he was saying.

The last broadside attack on Bohr’s theory from Einstein was the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) paper in 1935 which broached the subject of entanglement. Two particles A, B, initially together, fly off in different directions and when a distance apart, one property of A is measured; as measurement fixes a probability into some actual manifestation of a value and since the sum of A and B must have a conserved quantity as they began life together, knowing A instantly influences the value that registers of B. The probability spectrum at B is resolved, without the necessity for any measurement. This experiment required Bohr to dilute the notion of local measurement as the glue of reality that holds the mathematical construction together.

John Bell, the physicist who gave mathematical rigour to the consequence that entanglement has for reality, recalled:

Bohr reformulated the passage from EPR into a metaphysical discussion of what physicists mean when they say ‘reality.’ This reformulation, together with Bohr’s repetition of a few measurement procedures, has a strong rhetorical effect. Following Bohr’s analysis of measurement procedures time and time again, the reader enters into Bohr’s frame of mind and, without noticing, loses any critical perspective on the verificationist ground that Bohr gradually and carefully builds. By tinkering with the wording of EPR, Bohr creates an illusion that Einstein, Bohr, and the reader all share the same epistemological stand concerning the connection between theory and experiment. It is on this ‘common’ ground that Bohr ‘defeats’ Einstein. (Bell, p. 155)

The connection between theory and experiment (that Bohr subtly argues) is measurement as the sole determiner of existence. When chance relates to measured events, then Bohr is right and Einstein is wrong. What Einstein is trying to say is the chance of both events A and B are linked or entangled beyond the context of measurement. The chance of A adapts to the presence of B in the form of existence out of emptiness. A and B are both chances that have no firm form except in the temporal occurrence that realises existence through them.

Chance is a natural part of the way emptiness meets with existence. Chance or probability becomes for Bohr a concept about existence itself, as colour is a concept of optics for Newton. But this is to miss the very quality of chance. Chance is the orienting of events to show the whole potential of identity to the state of being lost. Chance happens all the time. When travelling, the getting lost in unfamiliar territory is continually opening up opportunity for chance to signify the way.

These chances are not mere happenstance, side-events to the main physical purpose of transporting oneself over the globe. The chances are the quality by which existence originally, uniquely and lightly shows itself to emptiness. Chances develop alongside other equally bona fide journeys to existence.

Chance is in scientific rhetoric, a slightly derogatory term that has to do with a quality that escapes proper definition. It lies forgotten at the bottom of the piles of papers talking about good definable concepts as matter and position. But actually what has been left hidden in the depths is the essence of life itself. The relation of existence to potential through chance is illustrated in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Chance between freedom and resolution.

Chance events are thus not exclusive in their occurrence. They are more the subtle communicators of existence. Chance events dance between emptiness and existence and so may sum the ground of potential into established fact in a coherent way.

The exile of chance into the world of concepts is further illuminated in the exchange between Sir Arthur Eddington and his student Chandrasekhar.

Naming and structure

The different historical understandings of zero in Eastern and Western cultures is illustrated by the difficulty of the great physicist and philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington to accept the theory of his gifted Indian student, Chandrasekhar. Eddington held to the belief of the ability of concepts to decisively frame the world. Eddington’s faith in mathematics is illustrated in the following:

Our whole theory has really been a discussion of the most general way in which permanent substance can be built up out of relations, and it is the mind which, by insisting on regarding only the things that are permanent, has actually imposed the laws on an indifferent world. (Eddington 1920, p. 197)

This understanding of physics by Eddington prompted Wheeler to say of one of his most talented students Peter Putnam, who fell from academia through some type of inner upheaval:

Under the influence of Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, he had come to believe that all the laws of nature could be deduced by pure reasoning. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to disabuse him of this belief. (Wheeler 1998, p. 254)

This attempt to see the world through the names we give it, was the goal of science according to Eddington.

One had to seek in the mathematics by reasoning alone for what behaved as the thing one wanted to describe. One could then identify the physical behaviour with the mathematical concept as equivalent, without having then to inquire deeper into the substantive quality beyond its mathematical representation.

The black hole that Eddington then fell down was the prediction by his student Chandrasekhar studying the implication of relativity, that dense stars would collapse and lose all their structure. These physical black holes seemed to violate the very principle of knowing the world by passively naming its elements. This led Eddington in 1935 to publicly ridicule the discovery:

The star has to go on radiating and radiating and contracting and contracting until, I suppose, it gets down to a few kilometres radius, when gravity becomes strong enough to hold in the radiation, and the star can at last find peace. … I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way! (Eddington 1935)

This put–down buried the theory of the Indian Chandrasekhar until many years later he was to win the Nobel Prize for the discovery! The physicist Arthur Miller concludes:

Chandra’s discovery might well have transformed and accelerated developments in both physics and astrophysics in the 1930s. Instead, Eddington’s heavy-handed intervention lent weighty support to the conservative community of astrophysicists, who steadfastly refused even to consider the idea that stars might collapse to nothing. As a result, Chandra’s work was almost forgotten. (Miller, p. 150)

This interchange shows the contrast in emphasis between existence and emptiness of Western and Eastern approaches. The discovery of the black hole was thus a cataclysm at the very foundation of Western thought. How had the power of zero been usurped from reason and been turned into a cosmic emptiness?

Where thought understood the world literally, the emptiness of the black hole was simply an end. But Chandra, accepting emptiness as potential, could see even to the possibility that the death of the star would result in the new light of a white hole.

Unravelling

Critically it was chance that ended up showing the real meaning of quantum theory, as described in Chapter 1.

In 1941, the idea of the atom simply as matter had split into the extremely destructive potential of the atomic bomb device. Heisenberg and Bohr had become spokesmen for the two stories, of the Germans and the Allies, each holding one side of this incredibly destructive potential. The whole attempt to find certainty in the stable building block of matter had split apart into this situation in which they were representatives of these two sides involved in an ideological conflict.

The division of the world into concepts and imagination had turned into this huge potential for destruction, able to destroy the whole world and Bohr and Heisenberg were the two protagonists of this power that had been unleashed.

In using number to divorce matter from meaning, in trying to hide what science was really about, in trying to isolate matter, as if it could be seen as having nothing to do with meaning, circumstances unfolded to write meaning back into identity in this archetypal destructive way. Destruction was voicing itself through the very matter that concepts had isolated and separated out from meaning. In the very attempt to exclude meaning, to write it out of what science was about, the meaning still came through, but in this completely destructive way. It said, ‘If you want to live without meaning, then meaninglessness will make its nature apparent.’

Test of the nature of chance

Ridiculously, the whole edifice of modern science is built on – chance. Barfield analyses the place of chance in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

What were the phenomena of nature at the time when the new doctrine began to take effect, particularly at the Darwinian moment in the middle of nineteenth century? They were objects. They were unparticipated to a degree which has never been surpassed before or since. (Barfield, p. 65)

 

The phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented. If that is, for the most part, what our collective representations are today, it is even more certainly what they were in the second half of the nineteenth century. And it was to these collective representations that the evolutionists had to apply their thinking. (Barfield, p. 66–67)

 

By a hypothesis, then, these earthly appearances must be saved; and saved they were by the hypothesis of – chance variation. Now the concept of chance is precisely what a hypothesis is derived to save us from. Chance, in fact, = no hypothesis. Yet so hypnotic, at this moment of history, was the influence of the idols and of the special mode of thought which had begotten them, that only a few were troubled. (Barfield, p. 68–69)

Physics is also about chance. Probabilities are central to quantum theory. The whole edifice of the structure of modern science thus rests on no-one really looking at the nature of this word – chance.

Chance isn’t something that relates just to the known world but it also relates to the unknown. What happens when chance visits us in some state of being lost, where things do not add up?

Chance is not by definition just an aspect of existence. As with the Copenhagen meeting, chance has a way of reflecting back to us the whole meaning behind our behaviour. It is necessary to disentangle chance from our mental construct of how the world works.

Embodying division

We all think that the quantum world is there. We all feel terribly important in it. According to Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, it is solely the use of concepts as revealed through measurement that gives the quantum world its reality. Without us observing the world in its conceptual foundation, the atom would just fold in on itself, unable to recognise any more how it was supposed to work. For concepts alone infer existence through the act of measurement. Reassuringly as when we touch wood, we pronounce our daily concepts to keep the atom from falling in on itself.

We have built a whole empire on the view that it is our concepts that allow reality to work. Identity only holds by the constructs of our concepts.

We need to be clear on this. We do not use our cars just to get from A to B, but our cars (and mobile phones) give over our human significance to a concept. This is what one does. The car exists because our use of the concept ‘car’ brings it being. But this existence of the concept ‘car’ is not just a gesture on its own. The concept that can be measured is the philosophical basis of quantum theory. Our identification of the concept, as ‘car’ precedes the existence of matter that is consequence of the theory. In acknowledging the world built through atoms, as ‘car’, we are breathing life into existence as a whole, including us.

And of course such a superstition works after a fashion. We rush around in these cars adding to a mountain of conceptual exchange that contributes towards economic growth. We skirt over a surface that is necessarily human in its construction. We have so outgrown the superstition of belief that we are shocked to hear even a whisper that what upholds reality is a superstition of belief.

The Egyptian gods who held up the sky have been replaced by man-made, hard-core, scientific concepts. We can prove it. If we took away the concept, that idea inside our mind that we substitute for reality (and as a car drives us from here to there), then there would be nothing for measurement to say about the world, which would leave the world as a stuck record, forever waiting for the next…

What was the word?

Indeed the next word escapes us.

Beyond concepts

The world of concepts detaching from the reality that had seemingly been its origin, is not the end. When retreating totally from the world of concepts, a link to reality remains, there is a potentiality in the concepts that is still effective in giving future place in the world. As in Pauli’s dreams, concepts from modern physics are not simply describing something actual (the configuration of particles), but are also describing a journey of the spirit.

In what follows in my personal story there is also an understanding about the use of concepts in science in general and especially modern physics.

In the telling of my journey using the same conceptual parameters as modern physics or in Pauli’s dreams providing the framework for his spiritual journey, something essential is being touched upon. There is clearly some other avenue open to the way concepts are used in physics that takes one into, rather than away from, the light of one’s human presence.

There is a dimension of darkness, of the unknown and of mystery, into which we can drop, where chance is the guide of a way, journey, process of individuation. This dimension of darkness is transparent to the relating of events of chance to illuminate a composite path of possibility for those who enter. The domain of possibility one enters in surrendering one’s own certainty relies on a possibility and chance, not yet evident, to realise the illumination of a unity that lives in the happening.

There is something more basic in the relatedness of concepts that can guide the being to express finiteness with regard to wholeness. These concepts are not about thought prescribing for the world a predictable form; they are about the actuality of experience arriving at the far shore of existence.

The freedom of concepts is in their ability to mediate the knowing of meaning against the challenge of emptiness. So the true concept, elicited from the book of nature most skilfully, has within it both the key to destruction and the way to meaning. The concept mediates the world that destroys itself and thus obliterates the richness of experience, or the world stands as whole realisation of meaning through the concept.

The focus of happening has to reside between the zero and the one, able to reference both the zero of the east, and the one of existence of the Greeks. The only way to do this is to experience the zero of the east in the relation to one of the Christian God and the unity of matter inherited from the Greeks.

In-falling light

In the black hole example of Eddington and Chandrasekhar given above, it seemed as if the interrelationship of certain concepts – matter, space, time and light – had a chronic flaw in them. This flaw seemed at first glance to bring down the whole endeavour of physics as giving conceptual structure to the universe (and thus troubled Eddington into making the claim that the phenomenon should be outlawed). In the circumstance of dense packed matter, as in a collapsing star, all matter and context of space-time fall into a singularity of non-existence, the black hole.

Eddington was one of the foremost physicists addressing this quandary. In 1924 he found in the mathematics a convincing solution to the problem (alas, one whose consequences he could not himself believe in.) Eddington changed the reference elements of description from matter, space and time into a new mix of these parameters describing a light photon that was falling into the hole. The concepts no longer annihilated each other, but allowed for a holding description of the phenomenon. (See Misner et al., p. 828–29.)

What is more, he could uncover another aspect of the phenomenon known as a white hole from the perspective of a photon of light, that was arising out of the hole, as mediator of re-creation! (See Misner et al., p. 829–30.)

To understand the fall from existence, we can no longer deal with concepts as static elements, but have to relate them to the actual experience of something as light falling, or conversely arising from the singularity (or hole) of existence. What worried Eddington about this was that physics could no longer be viewed as an abstract exercise of giving structure to the universe. It required the experience of destruction and creation first hand, to render a meaningful account. Thus Eddington felt the need to snub Chandrasekhar’s claim that such bodies could exist. But the evidence of the mathematics was that the riddle of the universe, through its fall and subsequent re-creation, could only be given description in the experience of something falling and re-arising through the hole of conceptual darkness.

Eddington’s change of conceptual coordinates amounted to the ability of an exemplar of darkness, or a visionary of light, to hold a constancy by which the fall or renewal could know itself as a structured process of consequent steps. The exemplar or visionary held the fall, that the material deconstruction was not a terminal fate, but an ordered dynamic in preparation for the regeneration of the whole.

The discovery of the black/white hole dynamic exactly reflects the ground of this book. The fall from the fixedness that our conceptual map gives us, allows a consequent re-arising through light to re-illumine the whole sense of the universe in which we live. However we cannot hope to understand this experience, in a static way, but have to live its consequence in the path of the shadowing and re-arising of light.

The black hole cannot be a purely objective phenomenon, since it involves the dissolution of the conceptual basis of physics. It requires a journey that allows the perspective of light over the duration of the fall and the re-arising of light. In suspending my reality to report on this fall until arriving at new illumination, my being as a participant in reality was able to provide just this perspective.

Fundamental question

With my travels in Africa and the Alps, a sense of acquaintance with a fundamental aspect of the universe was born. I had surrendered myself to a question at the heart of experience. Yet the job to which I returned in Rotterdam, Holland, typified the sense that life was the mere mechanical logic that could be coded into a machine, my computer programming task. Here the office mentality was a concentration of the scientific view that the universe had developed by an essentially material accident, that later threw up life and the ability in humans to reflect on where we have come from. According to this hypothesis the only true guide to tell us how to live in the universe, was the fortuitous ability of our minds to conceptualise the material processes of our origins.

I then learnt that the relation to the underlying question also included negation, the no-saying to the universe, that the question might be illuminated newly.

This negation of the question, I experienced in a state of despair, where an elemental aspect of myself was unable to find voice. This ‘no’ to the question of the universe sounded in my very deepest existence, beneath any outside factors of conciliation. And what happened in this ‘no’ to the elemental question was that the very ground of the universe fell away. There was no outside or inside, background or foreground, world or distinction.

This state of negation of the universe was not as I first assumed some terminal dislocation. The question could be re-asked in a new way, allowing a different type of answer that included my soul’s affirmation. The despair that made me travel through the overturning of conceptual description also was the way for a fundamental renewal in the address of the universe.

This was my own journey, to fall into the very isolation of the connection between zero and one, the vastness of potential explored in travelling and the insistence on names, labels, and compartments in the western application of Aristotle’s one. An attempt was made to resolve the paradox of the East and West, India and Greece, in the Renaissance, through thought and the intellect. Now happening itself was to live the zero coming into new relation to the one.

Falling off the chair

One evening, in Dizzy’s café in Rotterdam sitting with work colleagues, we were playing a game of lateral thinking, where one person posed a riddle and the others had to deduce the events preceding it that had resulted in this seemingly paradoxical consequence. My riddle was someone falling off his chair. After half an hour of clue searching I had no idea how I could admit that my puzzle was simply made-up, without an answer, when one of the players twigged, ‘Are you pulling our leg?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘That’s why he fell off the chair!’

The paradox of this actual game, played in the depths of a crisis, illustrates something greater. Although concepts have fallen from their role of following the rule of the game of providing examples of lateral thinking for the others to guess, the spirit of my attempt was still alive. The unity of what lateral thinking actually signifies, lives behind the muddle I had put myself in and the joke having gone on too long for me to admit it was made up. Thus even though the conceptual hold of what I was doing in carrying out this deception had gone, this does not mean the game is given up.

What happens now is a real case of paradoxical lateral thinking. It dawns on one of the players that the answer might lie outside the very rules of the game itself. ‘Are you pulling our leg?’ At this point the unity of lateral thinking as an intuitive whole reality grasps the opportunity to answer, ‘Yes, that’s why he fell off the chair.’ In other words, the unity of lateral thinking shows itself outside the very rules that limit what conceptual thinking and its practice through these examples is supposed to be about. The conceptual take on lateral thinking through examples is always going to be flawed. But when one accepts the limitation of lateral thinking by inventing something outside of its rules, then the unity can show itself as actual in the very defeat of everything that the conceptual was trying to establish. Thus in the laughter of understanding, the conceptual has on the one hand been duped by our complete upturning of the rules and yet the very attempt has lent itself to tell us what lateral thinking is in its unity beyond any conceptual example.

At such a moment, the darkness suddenly and momentarily inverts, as if reason itself has been turned on its head and has allowed light to enter. The understanding given in light is more than my own specific situation in playing the game. Something deeper is being communicated in the way that the conceptual game of reason itself is being turned upside down. The depth of seeing in emptiness gives to this specific reality of the game in the café, a universal lesson. Existence is able to judge itself anew in the foundation of what is valuable.

Orientation

While I travelled, lived, laughed and posed myself in the world, it was always as if my ownership of experience stopped at the thought of it.

Back in Europe I had entered into an office of computer programmers, which was itself a world of pure thought. Computer programming was a profession living in the ownership of the thought of the world.

Although my direct hold on existence had dissolved, there remained a potency in an inner freedom, that was able to seek in the world a new coherence out of the collapse of old orientation.

I was reminded about travelling by the excited return of a colleague Stewart, from four weeks travelling around Kenya. Stewart’s account awoke in me the following:

In this sudden reversal of emptiness to reflect a light from somewhere up above, of the coherence of a new freedom, something strange happened. A friend came into the café and engaged in a conversation about the reality of the spirit against the convention of the world. At one point she used the words: ‘Never mind your debt to society, what about your responsibility to mankind?’

I had used these same words myself some weeks prior to my encounter with emptiness. Emptiness could reveal a path to existence that was shared. The surrender of the world of existence, as called by cultural norms, allowed that potential speaks itself across separate realities. The emptiness, beyond the personal, allows for many individual perspectives to constitute the universal nature of existence together.

Quality

Balancing the world with nothing, I picked up Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and asked Quality to judge the scale.

Originally, according to Robert Pirsig, the one in Greece had referred to skilful action, arte, the unity a person brought to the world through the quality of their engagement. This was the belief of the Sophists. At the time of Aristotle and Plato, when philosophy came to be written down, the one became idealised in the world of ideas of Plato and as a logical concept in Aristotle.

Arte turned into a conceptual value. The emphasis of the ground of existence shifted from the experiential to the conceptual. This tendency of abstraction was then exacerbated in the way Greek thought came to the West through Arab translation.

Pirsig similarly seeks a unity between his experiences in the East having been in Korea in the war and as teacher and explorer going to the roots of Greek thought in the U.S. His breakthrough is then to understand that quality as the bridge between East and the Greeks, zero and one, spirit and science, is to be found in experience.

Following his own madness, in being forced down the road of reason, his return to sanity is in seeing the notion of quality as extant in the world. Quality lives in the excitement of adventure. It is the spark of happening. And from quality, the world of both reason and spirit follow. Quality is an event of seeing. Quality is the content of chance. Quality thus lives in the world of experience and does not borrow from the foundations of science or art but is the origin of both these undertakings.

Pirsig chances his own sanity to return to the essence of science and art as the forming of existence out of emptiness. Quality tells me that notwithstanding the fall of reason and the stranding of spirit, the world is always open to reveal its whole nature anew, to the one who journeys.

Egypt

Quality determined my course of action to take a month off work and hitch to Egypt.

Travelling in my thoughts down a line of known reference points, time becomes my capacity for action to create what might be ahead. History stops.

 

A TV crew asks me in a randomly chosen interview what I feel should be done to restore the pyramids and I respond, ‘build something new’. Following the line of the Nile, peasants step eternally in their robes to break my inner monologue with the offer of tea. Staying at a hostel near Luxor, the outcasts of society reflect the day in the simplicity of the still life drawing of a boot.

 

Struggling with the bank of inner thought and throwing myself into the day of tombs, pharaohs, a skull found in the sand, I try to communicate this find and someone thinks I am talking about a murder and loses interest on discovering it to be an ancient loss. A group on departure turns the lights out, leaving me momentarily in the actual darkness of a tomb.

 

The tombs straddle life and death, their back west-facing to the Desert and Death, their front, forward facing, to the Nile and Life. Inside the tombs, drawings depict the life of the deceased, representing the glorious scenes of earthly light to the inner chamber sealed in darkness. The funerary jars hold the worth of the human’s life to be weighed against the judging deity. Colourfully, the world illuminates aspects of the divine, straddling their light across the boundary, facing back the Dead upon the arena of Life.

 

The temple of Luxor at six in the morning, before the tourist coaches arrive. Sphinxes still stretch some of the two kilometre way to the temple of Karnac. One obelisk (and its absent partner in Trafalgar Square), stands at the gateway, where entering the Temple, one manoeuvres around a Mosque, built on the ruins. The Nile’s blue colours, the crisp air of another cloudless day and suddenly everything is here. Time flows from that ancient place through me, the past slips quietly through the ancient temple stone, the secret that it too had been living for the same future, that nothing about the world was yet decided. Even as I stand, in my jeans and cotton jacket, the substantiation of its message lives in the reach of my experience. Held in the light of the sun, its cycle is still eternal, its conjuring of earth’s mystery still faithful. Time no longer separates, but rather communicates a developing depth of task, as relevant to the tangent of today as of then. The historic dissolves in a common endeavour that bestows upon me an equality of task with this ancient core. (Franses 1982)

Barfield: