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Physics vs. Metaphysics:
A False Divide
by Jessica Murray
February 1997
"Everything you see
has its roots in the unseen world." --Rumi
The physicist Will
Keepin, a scientist with a distinctly metaphysical bent, has organized the
objections he hears to astrology into two categories: the first being the
claim that there is no evidence for astrology, and the second being the claim
that there is no theoretical mechanism for it.
The no-evidence claim
is invalidated by the much-touted studies of Michel Gauquelin, who began with
a quest to disprove astrological correlations and ended up compiling reams
of data validating them. Whether all this statistical corroboration is relevant,
however, is perhaps a more interesting question than whether it exists. It
must be stated up front that astrology has a preeminent spiritual component,
and any attempt to reduce a numinous symbolic system to patterns of numbers
has built-in problems. At the very least, much will be lost in translation.
Attempting to answer
the second claim is proving to be highly enlightening, for it leads the writer,
an astrologer, into the alien world of science.
Why does the very idea
of giving astrology unbiased consideration elicit such exaggeratedly dismissive
reactions from so many self-avowedly serious scientists? Even just positing
the existence of a theoretical mechanism for astrology seems to incite disturbance;
for it flies in the face of epistemological developments religiously held
to as modern, and therefore presumably superior.
The irony missed by many
in both battling camps is that astrology's conceptual underpinnings are not
only very, very old, but also very, very new.
The assumption
astrology makes is that there is some form of invisible order that constructs
the physical universe.
Plato’s
God
Students of classical
philosophy will recognize this as Plato's view: that the cosmos is a living
body of ideas. He believed that thought is fundamental to matter, and that
there exists some supreme organizing pattern, call it the Universal Mind,
that pre-originates and underlies everything we experience.
"We know things
because they are; things are because God* knows them".
---Plato, cf Charles Harvey
Let us consider
for a moment the use here of the word "God", which translations of
pre-Judeo/Christian/Islamic edicts misleadingly employ without factoring
in the difference between ancient and contemporary connotations. For
the purpose of this discussion, I propose that the modern word “God” conveys
a concept of far less subtlety than was intended by ancient thinkers. The
word has come to signify an anthropomorphized deity, a religious cartoon
in the bearded-white-man-in-the-sky mode.
If we wish to approximate
more closely the notions classical and pre-historical peoples had in of the
numinous, more apt might be the Chinese concept of the Tao: not a supernatural
being, but an all-encompassing cosmic intelligence characterized by neutrality,
mystery, dynamism and impersonality. Or instead of “God” we might say
Divine Law; or, as even, as George Lucas would have it, The Force.
As the astrologer Rob Hand
has observed, the Biblical pronouncement that "In the beginning was the Word
(Logos)" could be interpreted to mean: It was an idea that
started the universe. This is to say that deas, not pieces of matter,
are the basic building blocks of life.
If ideas create and
underlie matter, what is the cybernetic world view but neo-neoplatonism? As
any computer geek will tell you, the universe is made up of information.
Life itself is information.
How might we apply this concept
to the realm of human function?
Archetypes
Hand reminds us that
the term logos refers not to alphabetic language, but to archetypal
language: key ideas that organize all aspects of existence into equivalent
layers.
Here is where literalism
begins to fail us. So let us turn to the vocabulary of psychology, which was
the first of the new sciences to attempt to map terrain beyond the literal.
Jung's early 20th century
discovery of archetypes reintroduced a very ancient understanding:
that the universe is made up of parallelisms, interrelated layers of meaning,
all having something essential in common but manifesting in an infinite variety
of ways. Though the focus of Jung’s theory was the human mind, his position
was that archetypes are transcendent essences that govern more than just
the psyche. They pre-date and live on beyond the individual. For example,
the multidimensional symbol going by the name of a particular god or goddess
in a myth is an archetype.
Jung, like Plato, saw
the human psyche as penetrating the whole cosmos. For him archetypes were
ideational chunks of meaningfulness, linking things and events through their
same quality. They pertain to both inner and outer realities.
So it is with astrological
principles. The old doctrine of the four elements, for instance, was seen
as applying not merely to objective reality. As Stephen Arroyo has pointed
out, the human and natural realms were seen as one and the same thing; and
the elements were descriptive of modalities of existence, characteristics
of /subjective as well as objective reality/ the exterior world and the interior
world as well. Whatever was hot, sharp, active or strikingly individual, was
referred to as "fiery".
We still use such terms in
our current vernacular, and everybody knows instinctively what they mean.
For example, the characterization “She’s a fiery woman” needs no explanation.
How can this be? Jung would say it is because they are innate images that
dwell within the collective unconscious. We are all born with a set of universal
pictures. Every human imagination is pre-equipped with the same raw building
blocks.
Pool-Table
Universe
The idea that there is
an omnipresent unifying Force, an unseen matrix of patterning beneath the
explicit realm, has been a constant in religious and philosophical thought
all over the world and in every age.
In European culture this
idea went underground in recent centuries, when the “Age of Reason”, reacting
against the draconian excesses of the church, repudiated it as intellectually
indefensible. But what is so intriguing is that in our age it seems to be
science -- and not even the "soft" social sciences but the hardest of the
hard sciences: physics --- that is bringing this idea back.
Nonetheless, outdated
modernism is dying hard. Since Descartes in philosophy through Newton in science
and Skinner in psychology, we have upheld as our unquestioned truth the theory
of mechanistic materialism, applying it to every arena of human life -- even
demanding that it explain The Mysteries, a job that it is fatally unequipped
to do.
Astrocartographer Jim
Lewis has likened the mechanistic model to "a pool table universe".
Everything began at the Big Bang, we are supposed to believe; and ever since,
all the atoms just keep bumping each other around, arbitrarily, through pure
cause-and- effect. If life was somehow born out of the mess, it was
a freak accident.
This model of the universe
posits the existence of independent, isolated forces impacting each other
in an untouchably objective outer world (the only "real" world). In this
view of things, there is no place for the numinous, so the numinous has been
dismissed.
Stanislav Graf has
noted how, as modern rationalism took root in consensus thinking, intellectuals
began to look upon spirituality as the refuge of the uneducated. Experiences
of the divine came to be diagnosed either as eruptions from an infantile
part of the mind that projects deific qualities onto a parent (and vice versa),
or as pathological illusions to be cured with pharmaceuticals.
Yet until very recently in
human history, science and religion were the same thing.
Everything
is relative
Eighteenth and nineteenth
century science has given rise to a great many machines. But one begins to
wonder, looking around at the ecocidal mess we are in physically, and the
nihilistic pathos we are in philosophically, whether this perspective has
not left us rather in a lurch in the areas of life that really count.
Now, when it looks
as if science has gone just about as far as it can go in banishing the spiritual,
bursting upon the scientific scene comes quantum mechanics, the key theses
of which seem stunningly close to the assumptions held by the ancient mind.
Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle has posited that if you look at "objective" reality closely enough,
it is in fact subjective in the most literal sense of the word: the presence
of an observer measurably impacts the object observed.
In recent decades the
phrase "everything is relative" has entered into common parlance, and so
little by little is the idea gaining currency that at the most microscopic
levels of matter, the sacrosanct rules of cause-and-effect are flagrantly
violated. Even the laws of temporality seem to fail. Sheldrake, carrying on
the Heisenburg torch, has shown that not only does there seem to be an acausality
in time, linking events through some mechanism Newton never dreamed of ,
but in space as well.
Beyond
Quantum Physics
Will Keepin has integrated
the ideas of the theoretical physicist David Bohm, a colleague of Einstein's,
into a far-ranging postmodern framework of understanding. Using Bohm's term,
holomovement , Keepin describes existence as having a unifying quality, "a
single unbroken wholeness in flowing movement", and a holographic quality,
each piece of it containing the whole.
We already know that individual
cells of the same body "know" what each other are "thinking"; and that each
cell houses the DNA which contains a map of the entire organism. That there
is a parallel connectivity of life force at work on the pre-physical level
as well does not, in fact, seem like such a leap.
Bohm’s holomovement contains:
1) the implicate order ,
a "ubiquitous wavelike information field that interpenetrates every point
in space-time", not manifest but perfectly real, which co-exists with
2.) the explicate order
we can see and touch.
The implicate order
is an aboriginal pool of data: it prefigures the physical universe, it brings
information to the physical universe about the rest of the universe, and
it creates a blueprint of what will become manifest.
Here it is again: a
model of the cosmos as an unbroken flow of information, with ideas creating
form.
And there is reciprocity
between the two worlds. When he talks about the relationship between the implicate
and explicate orders, Keepin makes mention of the resemblance this idea bears
to Aurobindo's theory of involution and evolution, which outlined the dynamic
dance between spirit and matter.
Bohm went beyond the
quantum theorists who gathered the correlations. He believed that their descriptions
were merely statistical averaging operations, imposed upon as-yet-mysterious
situations. He wanted a deeper look at the exotic new micro-landscapes which
ultimately elude the measuring process.
He proposed that the material
world is not in fact caused by some invisible pre-material world, a
notion as limited by our conventions of time as conclusions based on quantification
are limited by our conventions about space.
It is rather that the two
realms interact constantly, bleeding one into the other. Jung might have termed
this interaction continuous synchronicity.
Mirrored
realities
Boem et al have given
us a mathematically derived model of two mutually reflecting, mutually supporting
dimensions, one material and one ephemeral. One is reminded of the beautiful
dynamism between Dream Time and the waking world described by Australian aborigines.
This is in essence
what is meant by astrology's most basic law: As Above, So Below. Planetary
cycles are the explicit representations of the non-explicit cycles that order
the experiences of human beings and all the rest of life.
The sun, moon and planets
move in regular patterns, so predictably that they have come to represent
those patterns. Thus they have always served as clocks. The cycles that the
planets describe --not the planets themselves -- pertain to both macrocosmos
and microcosmos. As above, so below; as within, so without. These cyclic
patterns are what astrologers study. Arroyo has called astrology "an operating
manual for monitoring the underlying order".
In earlier times, prediction
was held to be the sine qua non of astrology. The inexactitude of such attempts
should cause us to doubt not astrology, but this use of it.
Planetary
archetypes
The principles encoded
by celestial cycles can manifest in an infinitude of ways. Jupiter, for example,
is a symbol for the law of expansion, which takes many forms. To the 19th
Century astrologer, this planet governed mind-broadening long journeys as
well as advanced study; a generation ago its meaning came to include the
“mind-blowing” experience of an acid trip. Jupiter represents all forms of
expansion. It can mean changing from a regular camera lens to a wide-angle
lens; it can mean building an addition to a house. How do we know which version
of the archetype will manifest? We don’t. We limit ourselves by needing to
single one out.
Who knows what will
happen when Venus, the principle of attraction, cycles around and "makes a
return" in someone's chart? Experience has shown this astrologer that mutually
magnetic meetings are quite likely under such transits, but one does not
have to meet a lover to feel the magic of Venus. Simply being aware that
you are coming under the influence of the planet of love and beauty can open
your heart, perhaps more so without a concrete expectation of what that will
look like.
Beyond
literalism
Literalism can stifle
the living magic of astrology as surely as fundamentalism snuffs out the
numinous in religion, as James Hillman has warned. When we try to use the
age-old correlations between sky cycles and earth cycles to chart our fates,
we are "caught by time", he says, rather than "regarding" time. The best
use to which this multi-leveled symbolic language can be put is to use it
as a tool to focus the intuition.
The hieroglyphics of
astrology mean nothing without our creative use of them. The rocks and gas
balls orbiting the sun are not where the meaning lies. The dynamic between
their patterns and our understanding of their patterns is where the meaning
lies.
This is a verity not confined
to astrology. As the great spiritual teachers have always tried to tell us,
consciousness is the only reality. In every facet of life, in every
moment, it is our understanding of a given situation that gives it its meaning
and impact.
1. Astrology, Psychology
and the Four Elements, S.Arroyo CRCSS 1975
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