Numerology and Sacred Geometry
Thomas Hobbes (1588- 1679) was among the growing trend of mechanical materialists who believed that nothing but tangible things were real.
But with the advent of quantum mechanics, reducing the ineffable to manageable, bedrock beliefs has proved elusive.
Many scientists asking questions about the meaning of quantum theory were issued the refrain: “Shut up and calculate!”
The American physicist Richard Feynman noted, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” He also said, “Quantum mechanics comes on as so off the wall that only a mystical state of mind can even begin to probe its mysteries!”
Feynman wasn’t the only one perplexed. Danish physicist Niels Bohr asserted that “If you can think about quantum theory without getting dizzy, you don’t get it.”
The quantum world is the world that’s smaller than an atom. Things at this scale don’t behave the same way as objects on the scale that we can see. These subatomic bits of matter don’t follow the same rules as objects that we can see, feel or hold. These entities are ghostly and strange. Sometimes, they behave like clumps of matter. They also can spread out as waves, like ripples on a pond.
It may be that as our knowledge grows our understanding lessens. In the 1980s’, author Guy Davenport pointed out:
The computer is fast becoming an extension of the brain, electronics of the imagination, chemicals of the body. Life, however, is not a technological ladder, it’s more of a cultural wheel. So, what we have gained in some respects we have lost in others. At religious festivals in India devout believers walk safely (at least most of them) across white hot coals. I find that incredible. A Lapp can telepathically communicate over a vast distance to another Lapp, walk a few hundred miles, and then meet them under a particular tree. I find that mystifying. The African bushman points to a specific point on the horizon and says — ‘there are zebras’. We look — and see nothing. I find that rather sad.
More recently, Jungian psychologist James Hollis made an interesting point about Covid, saying:
It is human nature thrown back upon itself, stripped of its phanticized sovereignty. But it is, remembering Jung, in such moments that one is invited to radically reframe one’s sense of self and other.
Given this incredibly inflated understanding of where we stand in the cosmos, we may say that our traumatic encounter with the Covid-19 pandemic is a Divine encounter -not as a punishment from an anthropomorphic character sitting upstairs judging all below, not as a refutation to further presumptive beliefs, but as a GPS summons to recalculate the actual position of the ego, and human life in general, in the larger scheme of mystery. As individuals have had to sequester, lose contact with their normal pursuits, and encounter their powerlessness against something a thousand times smaller than a grain of salt, they have had to go back to their metaphysical drawing board in so many ways. It will be interesting to see what long-term changes and such recalculations bring to individual lives and our social structures.
The poet D. H. Lawrence countered the growing rationalism of his day by penning the phrase, “I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.”
Read the full blog article here
Originally published at https://adifferentdrummer.com.au.
