One trap that New Age, fundamentalist Christian, and other religious speakers often fall into is using scientific evidence in physics to back up their truth claims. Subsequent discoveries in science often render their evidence moot, and this is used to debunk the spiritual stuff being communicated. It’s a shame because the problem isn’t always that the spiritual substance is false.
Rather than, for example, citing the latest discoveries in physics to “prove” a spiritual claim, it would behoove those who do so to use those discoveries as metaphors for the spiritual claim. This is because physics is a language. It is a “Western” language that describes observations of a moment in a fluctuating universe. We are erroneously told that physics is not a language but a fact-finding study about matter and its behavior.
What does all of this mean? Let’s get into it….
Truth is immutable; physics is ever-changing. The reason that physics is fluid is that it’s a language. We don’t generally treat it that way, but it is. It is a way of speaking about the universe. Not a description of anything definite, but a description of what we can understand right now, from a specific perspective. Physicists may believe that their language is describing something immutable by methodically uncovering how reality works, as if each reveal is bringing us closer to an unwavering set of facts that are mathematically encoded within, or perhaps as, the universe. If true, then there should be an end to discovery somewhere down the line. Somewhere down the line, we should be able to know everything—at least everything that can be picked up by human senses, technology, or inferred by deduction. At the end of the line, Truth and facts should meet and agree forever. We should end up with final answers.
But that isn’t how discoveries in physics work, is it? We pretend this is how they work because, for a while, new discoveries beget other new discoveries and they seem to fit together like puzzle pieces, or to transcend and include each other. And yet some physicist will inevitably come along and turn the whole thing on its ear, rendering not just a fact or two, but the entire line of inquiry moot with their insights. There is no end to that because facts are malleable.
Truth, on the other hand, is not malleable. Truth is living, timeless, and absolute. But speaking it converts this one living movement into numerous dead concepts that are malleable. When Truth is the center of the body’s existence, the self is God. When the thinker is the center of the body’s existence, the self is playing God. Such a one considers and discards truths as s/he hears them, because the self playing god wants to exist. Such decisions are its game. This, we erroneously call free will.
Physicists play this game in reverse. Much how the self at large believes Truth to be truths, physicists believe facts to be Fact. The unwritten rule of science is that facts are ironclad Fact, until proven otherwise and relentlessly fought against. But that proving otherwise isn’t really seen for the negation of a concretized reality that it is. It’s seen as chipping away the false to reveal the real Fact, like switching gods when one church leaves you wanting. Each time they adopt a new theory, they assume they’ve got it right. Until they have to admit they’re wrong. But that’s okay, it’s just another layer of the false being shed to reveal the true, the Fact. We’ll get this right eventually.
Yeah! Go, Team Logic!
Incidentally, if you see a parallel to positive negation here, you win a gold star.
Sadly, this remains the orthodox way of approaching physics, even though physicists the world over are mainly in agreement that the universe is not concrete and mechanical, but is manifesting such an appearance from energy. (Or, alternatively, that matter and force are inseparable and simultaneous.) One wonders if the cognitive dissonance that is causing the disconnect between their approach to the reality they’ve uncovered and the reality itself is an amalgamation of the colonialist impulse to discover and conquer, and the desire to be immortalized as a discoverer.
Simply put, what’s keeping science from Truth is the very scientist avoiding it at all costs, the very person, that is, who wants to be self-as-god, not surrender to Godself. And this is the same person who naively uses the latest science to prove their spiritual truth claims. One who lives Truth has no compulsion to prove anything. When Truth is the self, Truth is self-evident.
By the way, saying the physicist and the spiritual speaker are the same person is a metaphor. And it’s a fact. Both are true.