New Paradigm

The image that now begins to emerge of the Cosmos—by means of NASA’s measurements of the effects of dark energy—provides yet another hint that Idries Shah’s fable of the beginnings might be true. I’ve been of that opinion for many years now. Among the myths it comes closest to agree with the cosmos of physics, at least if we accept David Bohm’s suggestion that our universe is a tiny Explicate Order emerging from the vast Implicate Order that is the greater, thus the Cosmos. (I discuss the first subject here on Ghulf Genes; more on Idries Shah’s myth is on this blog here.)

The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.

Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.

That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.

We can’t get closer than that, I assume.