Epilogue 2

Quantum Physics and the Teachings of Jesus:

An Appeal to Young-at-Heart Christians

In dedicating this epilogue to you as Christians, I am hoping that you are true to your namesake as disciples of Jesus. You may have some embodied teacher at the moment; you may have had many such teachers in your past; but Jesus has always been your great teacher, what a Hindu would call a sadguru, a true guru, a teacher who is stabilized in spirit.

The important question for all Christians is, of course, this: is the God that science is rediscovering the same as the Christian God? I have sometimes reassured you this is the case: the new science God is the same God as that of esoteric Christianity, and that of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckart and St. Teresa of Avilla. Nevertheless, I can demonstrate this by directly comparing Jesus' teaching with the lessons of quantum physics, which will remove all doubt. Or so I hope.

Jesus was one of the great spiritual masters of all time. He gave his teachings in terms of puzzles and paradoxes. This is already similar to the lessons of quantum physics, which also creates puzzles and paradoxes in our minds. Both Jesus and quantum physics are talking about reality, but are they talking about reality the same way? This is the great question. If they are talking about reality in terms of identical metaphors, however puzzling and paradoxical these metaphors may be to the rational mind, there is reason to conclude that there is convergence. Fundamentally, they are the same. Jesus' God and the quantum consciousness God are one and the same.

THE BASIC FABRIC OF REALITY

Consider the idea of the basic fabric of reality. Materialists say that reality at its base level is reduced to building blocks called elementary particles, such as quarks and electrons, and that causation is upward from this base.

But quantum physics says otherwise. In quantum physics, there are no manifest material objects independent of subjects—the observers. In quantum physics, objects remain as potentia, waves of possibility, until they are brought into manifestation through the act of observation. Quantum objects are waves of possibility, but possibility of what? They are the possibilities of consciousness. Consciousness, not matter, is the ground of being, in which matter exists only as possibilities. Through the act of quantum measurement or observation, consciousness converts possibility into actuality, by collapsing waves into particles or things, at the same time splitting itself into a subject that sees and objects that are seen.

What does Jesus have to say about the fabric of reality? It is quite unequivocal, albeit a little sarcastic to upholders of material supremacy. (All quotes from the Gospel According to Thomas are taken from Guillaumont et al., 1959.)

If the flesh has come to existence
because of the spirit
it is a marvel;
but if the spirit has come to existence
because of the body
it is a marvel of marvels.
(Thomas, p. 21)

Jesus says, resonating with quantum physics, that flesh has come into existence because of the spirit, not the other way around.

It also pleases me greatly that Jesus said, “Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” (John 3:6; 6:63). No support here for the materialist theories of the origin of life, including the theory of emergent autopoiesis (self-creation) of the holist. But Jesus' saying resonates fully with the quantum idea that life originates from tangled-hierarchical quantum measurement by consciousness. Of course, being a mystic, Jesus underestimates flesh, matter. In the new science, we now can spell out the contributing role of matter—it is to make manifestation possible and to make representations of the subtle.

NONLOCALITY AND TRANSCENDENCE

Popular Christianity posits God and the Spirit as separate from us; and this dualism, of course, is where most scientists find Christianity unscientific. If God is truly separate from us, then how can we receive God's guidance and love? How can flesh, material substance, interact with the nonmaterial divine?

Quantum physics has a different take on this. God is not separate from us; God is indwelling in us, in our unconscious. Consciousness is the ground of all being, which includes us. This resonates well with Jesus' statement, “My Father and I are one.” And if you interpret this statement to mean that Jesus is only talking about himself, that only he is the “son of the Father” and therefore identical to Him, the gospels say otherwise. Jesus repeatedly tells his listeners that all are children of God; they just have to realize it:

If you know yourselves
then you will be known
and you will know that
you are the sons of the Living Father.
(Thomas, p. 3)

Quantum physics also says, “You and I are one.” Consciousness or God collapses similar possibility waves in both of our brains if we are “correlated,” giving every one of us the opportunity to verify this idea of oneness. This idea has even been verified in the laboratory. If consciousness can collapse waves of possibility in your brain and mine simultaneously when we are correlated, we must be connected through our consciousness, which is nonlocal and a unity for both of us and, by inference, a unity for all of us.

The concept of nonlocality is subtle. It also implies that you and I are connected without any signals through space and time. So our connection through consciousness transcends space and time. Yet we are also manifestations of the same consciousness; it is consciousness that is immanent in us.

What is Jesus' view on these subjects? Let's take his well-known statement: “The kingdom of God is everywhere, but people don't see it.” So Jesus certainly knew and preached about God being immanent in the world. But is this an animistic worldview? Let's not be hasty. Here is another famous quote from Jesus:

If those who lead you say to you
“See, the kingdom is in heaven,”
then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you: “It is in the sea,”
Then the fish will precede you.
The kingdom of God does not come visibly,
Nor will the people say,
“Here it is,” or “There it is,”
because the kingdom of God
is within you.
(Luke 117:20-21)

And again, says Jesus:

But the Kingdom is within you
And it is without you.
(Thomas, p. 3)

The kingdom is not localizable; we cannot say it is here or there or at any one place. It is both outside and inside, both transcendent and immanent. All this is resonant with the message of quantum physics.

CIRCULARITY, TANGLED HIERARCHY, AND SELF-REFERENCE

One of the most interesting features of quantum physics is the circularity that exists in the observer effect: there is no collapse without an observer, but there is no (manifest) observer without collapse. The circularity is a tangled hierarchy of logic that gives us self-reference, the subject-object split that the observer experiences. Amazingly, Jesus was already intuiting this when he said;

If they say to you:
“From where have you originated?”
say to them:
“We have come from the Light,
Where the Light originated through itself.”
(Thomas, p. 29)

“Light” here refers to the Holy Spirit, the quantum self in the quantum physics language. We have come from the Light: our individuality is the result of conditioning. The Light originated through itself, through circularity, tangled hierarchy.

JESUS AND THE QUANTUM SELF

I previously said that the final stage of spiritual enlightenment is reached when one is steadily situated in quantum God-consciousness whenever one is processing unconsciously. I think that Buddha reached this last stage of enlightenment, because there are plenty of anecdotes about his equanimity.

But Jesus lived for a short time, and much of that time is shrouded in mystery and controversy. The accounts we read do suggest that Jesus sometimes engaged in meditation, but the gospels are more full of what Jesus said and miracle stories.

For Jesus, these miracle stories are very telling. Miracles are, of course, not performed in the unconscious, so they are not suggestive of whether Jesus was steadfast in God-quantum consciousness. But miracles do suggest that on those occasions Jesus acted from the quantum self, or what in Christianity is called Holy Spirit or simply Spirit, and he chose from possibilities beyond all limitations.

The idea is that ordinary creativity—vital and mental—involves the laws and contexts that are codified in the supramental domain of consciousness. Miracles that are in violation of physical laws, such as Jesus' conversion of water into wine, are suggestive of creativity that transcends the supramental laws of physics. In other words, the person who is doing it has unconscious access to possibilities beyond the supramental, beyond the limitation of the quantum laws of physics, in the bliss body itself, in turiya consciousness.

So it is not a surprise that Jesus sometimes spoke from this quantum self or Spirit consciousness, creating much confusion, as in his celebrated statement:

I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father
Except through me.
(John 14:6)

The Christian church has used these words in attacking other religions, other faiths. But it is confusing to Easterners, too, when they compare Jesus' statement with such statements by Eastern sages as “Those who are enlightened do not say, those who say are not [enlightened].” Should not a person whose self-identity has shifted beyond the ego to the Spirit at least be humble? By all accounts Jesus was a very humble man when he was in his ego, acting from an ordinary state of consciousness. Confusions of both groups disappear if we consider that when Jesus makes this kind of statement, he is speaking from the relatively rare nonordinary state of the quantum self. It is the same non-ordinary state from which he performed miracles that superseded physical laws.

And if you still have doubts that Jesus did sometimes talk from the nonordinary state of the quantum self, why else would he have made such a statement as this: “Before Abraham was born I am” (John 8:58)? Or for that matter, make a statement like “Learn and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father” (John 10:38)? A person has to be in the tangled-hierarchical state of the quantum self in order to realize the circularity that gives rise to the human condition.

JESUS AND CREATIVITY

The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us what Heaven's kingdom is like.”

He said to them:
It is like a mustard seed—
smaller than all seeds,
but when it falls on the tilted earth
it produces a large tree
and becomes shelter for all the birds of
Heaven. (Thomas, p. 15)

What does this mean to you? Why is Jesus emphasizing a seed that is smaller than all seeds? Could it be that an insight is a glimpse from the supramental, smaller than other seeds—the usual thoughts that clutter our psyche? And yet when this seed falls on the tilted earth, it becomes a large tree on which the birds of heaven take shelter. And yet when an insight comes to a prepared person (tilted earth), it produces a transformed mind (a large tree) where many of the archetypes (birds of heaven) can be represented (can take shelter). Thus Jesus knew of the three stages of inner creativity—preparation, insight, and manifestation. He did not mention the stage of unconscious processing here, but he does mention it elsewhere:

And he said, “The Kingdom of God is
As if a man should scatter seed upon
the ground, and should sleep and rise
night and day, and the seed should
sprout and grow, he knows not how….”
(Mark 4:26b-29)

The phrase “he knows not how” clearly acknowledges that some of the processing in inner creativity, growing the kingdom of heaven within oneself, is unconscious.

Jesus himself attained perfection, and he encouraged people to do the same:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew, 5:48)

And what does perfection consist of? It is being situated in command of the supramental beyond the mind—the realm of dualities:

Jesus said to them:
When you make the two one,
and when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner,
and the above as the below,
and when you make
the male and the female into a single one
so that the male will not be male
and the female not the female,
then shall you enter the Kingdom.
(Thomas, p. 17)

Many people are hesitant to endorse the Gospel according to Thomas as being fully authentic. If that is the case, can we trust that these words are authentic, that they did come from Jesus? In my opinion, if these words were inserted by another author, this other person would have to be wise as well. We should look for historical evidence for him or her. And until we find such evidence, we may as well ascribe these words to Jesus.

Do you see how tuned the discoveries and conclusions of the new science are to Jesus' teachings? Jesus said, integrate inner and outer. Usually, mystics emphasize the inner and downgrade the outer world. But not Jesus; he knew that God is both. Just as the gross/outer attracts the materialist, the subtle/inner may seem attractive to connoisseurs of consciousness. But we must resist the temptation and make the outer and the inner as one.

Similarly, we need to integrate the above and the below, the transcendent and the immanent, the wave and the particle in our quantum language. We must avoid the tendency of the religionist to embrace the transcendent in preference to the immanent. Likewise, we must avoid the materialist indulgence of embracing only the immanent while denying the transcendent.

Finally, why does Jesus say to us to integrate male and female? This does not seem to be a concern of quantum physics, does it? But I think Jesus is not talking about integrating our male and female psychological tendencies—Jungian style. I think he is talking about male-yang and female-yin in the sense of Chinese medicine, the creative and conditioned ways we process our subtle bodies. We need to integrate and use both methods always. Creative quantum leaps must be followed up with manifestation. Then shall we transform—then shall we enter the kingdom of heaven.

IF JESUS WAS TRANSFORMED, WHY WAS HE SO UNFORGIVING?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:

There is one serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: “Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world, nor in the world to come.”…I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world. (Quoted in Mason, 1997, p.186).

It is a reasonable expectation that a transformed person would see only God potential in another human being. Indeed, the transformed saint Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda said this about his guru: “My guru has the most beautiful eyes, because he cannot see evil in any one anymore, he only sees the divine potential.” Indeed it is well documented that Ramakrishna treated prostitutes and Brahmins with the same love, causing much unhappiness among members of the latter group.

But if Jesus is so unforgiving as to condemn people to eternal hell, then why should we not all feel like Bertrand Russell and do an about-face on Jesus? Like Russell, any modern Christian may feel this way.

The author Mark Mason (1997) has dealt with this subject quite well, and I refer the reader to his book. Mason demonstrates that Jesus never used the word “hell,” nor did he mean it. It is because of errors in translation from the original Greek and the manipulations of the medieval Christian church that Jesus' image has been tarnished in this way. Mason also argues cogently that the word “forgiven” in connection with speaking against the Holy Ghost is an unfortunate error in translation as well, not in keeping with the context.

As to being unforgiving, many stories, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 29-37), suggest otherwise when properly analyzed (Mason, 1997). And who doesn't know about the episode when he protected a woman from being stoned to death by saying, “Let him who has not sinned throw the first stone”?

WAS JESUS AN AVATARA?

There is something else that a modern Christian may find interesting to consider. Hindus accept Jesus as an avatara, which is their word for a person who is fully transformed. It is believed that avataras incarnate as human beings whenever the movement of consciousness stagnates (whenever conscious evolution is stalled). Does this fit with Jesus' situation?

It does indeed. Hindus consider people like Krishna, Buddha, Shankara, and Ramakrishna as avataras, because they all came at a time when religion and spirituality stopped being a force in people's life. These avataras restored spirituality to their societies. Similarly, Jesus came to rescue Judaism from an intense period of stagnation.

Another parallel is well known. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “I am the goal of the wise and I am the way.” As similarly Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

And of course, Jesus did say:

I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will hear my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. (John 10:16)

This resonates well with Krishna's declaration in the Bhagavad Gita:

In every age I come back
To deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner,
To establish righteousness.

Indeed the parallels are striking. So again, was Jesus an avatara? Is the concept of avatara even acceptable to the new science of God and spirituality that we have built here?

I have argued elsewhere (Goswami, 2001) that people who are completely transformed (another word is “liberated”) complete the death-birth-rebirth cycle. We can ask, what happens to their quantum monad with its fully perfected patterns of living when they die? Scientifically, we must concede, the quantum monad should be there in potentia available for future use.

Future use? How?

One use is for us to invoke such a quantum monad as a personal spirit guide through something like channeling. This we do. A Hindu has the option to use Krishna or Shankara as his or her spirit guide. Similarly, a Buddhist has Buddha, a Jew has Moses, a Moslem has Muhammad, and a Christian has Jesus.

A second use is to serve the needs of the evolution of consciousness. Whenever evolution stagnates, the evolutionary pressure brings about a rebirth of the quantum monad of the previous avatara. This is why Jesus says, “Before Abraham I am.” An avatara does not accrue any karma during his life. He takes birth with the perfected conditioning of the same perfected quantum monad of the previous avatara.

All right, there you have it. If what I have presented here helps you orient yourself better as a Christian to the new integrative science, then do consider Jesus' words, “There shall be one flock and one shepherd.” Obviously Jesus foresaw some sort of integration of all religions. Can the new science be the locus for a unifying dialogue among all the religions of the world? It is up to you to make that happen.