Inner Net of the Heart: The Emerging Worldview of Oneness
by William Keepin, PhD. An excerpt from The Song of the Earth, Gaia Education’s Worldview Key
At the cutting edge of science today, a powerful new awakening is taking place in many different disciplines. The key insight is this: beyond the physical realm, there exist invisible patterns and principles that somehow organize what we observe and experience in the physical world. Science is discovering that ‘something transpires behind that which appears’. This startling theme is emerging in field after field: including biology, physics, non linear dynamics, artificial life, brain physiology, complexity theory, transpersonal psychology, psycho-neuroimmunology, and ethnobotany — to name a few. This auspicious development points Western science in a remarkable direction toward the existence of a realm beyond the observable, material, empirical world. The stage is steadily being set for another major scientific revolution — one that will eventually weave science and spirituality — matter and spirit — together into a seamless unity.
At the same time, a parallel awakening is taking place across the world’s spiritual and religious traditions. As East meets West and North meets South, the oneness of all life is being revealed and manifest in unprecedented ways, and the essential unity of human spiritual consciousness is becoming increasingly recognized. The world’s wisdom traditions and religious disciplines are linking together, bringing a convergence and collaboration among previously disparate practices and teachings.
What is the meaning of these trends, and where are they headed? We are witnessing nothing less than a revolution of consciousness — the birth of a vast, integral worldview that unites and cross-fertilizes East and West, modern and indigenous, human and non-human, contemporary and ancient — all leading us toward a deep collective realization of the seamless oneness of existence. And this auspicious breakthrough is coming not a moment too late, because humanity urgently needs a comprehensive, unifying perspective in order to navigate our way through the challenging waters ahead, and begin building a new civilization of love and harmony. This is not a dreamy mystical vision. It is our destiny as the human family, and it is our birthright to bring this destiny into concrete manifestation.
The Emerging Synthesis of Science and Spirituality
The traditional Western scientific worldview has conditioned us to believe that the world and the cosmos are comprised of distinct, isolated, material objects — all separated from one another in space and set in dynamic motion according to rational, deterministic, mechanistic laws. This view of the universe reigned supreme for hundreds of years or more, bolstered by the observations of classical physics, biology, and other natural sciences. However, in the past century it began to crumble, driven by numerous remarkable discoveries at the frontiers of science. This led to a fundamental shift in perspective that began about 100 years ago with the advent of quantum theory and relativity theory in physics, and continued through the 20th century with major breakthroughs in biology, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, transpersonal psychology, and many other disciplines.
A new scientific paradigm is emerging that conceives of the universe as a vast network of energetic living systems, all interconnected in a complex web of relationships that manifest out of an underlying unified field. Atoms, once believed to be solid nuggets of matter, are revealed to be patterns of vibrating energy. Matter is composed almost entirely of empty space. A new holistic or integral worldview is emerging, in which the universe and all life in it comprise a single unitive whole.
These unprecedented discoveries are rapidly shifting our understanding of reality. Science is uncovering profound new levels of interconnection between matter and consciousness, which began with Heisenberg’s discovery that nothing exists in objective isolation from the rest of existence. For example, experiments in quantum physics show that every particle in the universe is somehow ‘aware’ of every other particle. A new principle of interconnection known as ‘non-locality’ has been confirmed in repeated experiments, showing that after two particles have interacted, their ‘spin’ properties are thereafter fundamentally interconnected. If we measure the spin state of one particle, the spin state of the other particle responds instantaneously, even if it’s located at the opposite end of the universe. This immediate ‘non-local’ connection between the particles transcends all separation in space and time, and thus precludes any possibility of a ‘signal’ of some kind carrying information from one particle to the other. Thus the entire universe appears to be intimately interconnected, and these discoveries hint at possible physical explanations for the increasingly recognized links between consciousness and matter.
Uniting Spirit and Matter: Beyond E = mc2
To take a closer look at what is emerging at the frontiers of science, let us examine one specific discipline more closely to see the essential shift that is taking place across so many disciplines. We will choose physics, the ‘hardest’ of the sciences. The reader may rest assured that no knowledge of physics is required to follow this section — only an eye for beauty.
We begin with the work of physicist David Bohm (1917–1992), a leading pioneer in science and spirituality. Bohm was a colleague of Einstein’s at Princeton, and the two of them shared similar views on the theoretical foundations of quantum theory. Bohm was driven by a deep passion to understand the nature of the Universe. He felt the true purpose of science was a quest for truth, and it disturbed him that many scientists regarded science primarily as a pragmatic means for prediction and control of nature and technology. Like Einstein, Bohm believed that science was a kind of spiritual quest, a deep search for truth or jnana yoga that strives to discover the ultimate secrets of existence.
Bohm probed deeply not only into modern physics, where he made major contributions, but he also carried his quest well beyond science itself. Bohm delved deeply into spiritual teachings and wisdom, and for more than 20 years he carried on in-depth dialogues with the Indian sage, Krishnamurti, and other leading spiritual masters including the Dalai Lama. He also explored art, to discover insights about the nature of order and form. Bohm eagerly embraced both scientific and spiritual forms of inquiry as a way to ‘triangulate’, so to speak, on the true nature of reality by taking into account the broadest possible range of data and methods of inquiry. Bohm began by asking what the twin pillars of the new physics — relativity theory and quantum theory — had in common, and he discovered that it is wholeness. Both theories proposed that the universe is a single integral whole, from the tiniest atoms to the largest galaxies. Building upon this foundation over 30 years of rigorous scientific work, Bohm emerged with the hypothesis that the essence of the universe is what he called the holomovement. ‘Movement’ means that the nature of existence is a process of continual change, and ‘holo’ means that it has a kind of holographic structure, in which each part contains the whole. In Bohm’s words, “The cosmos is a single, unbroken wholeness in flowing movement,” in which each part of the flow contains the entire flow.
This article is an excerpt from the Worldview Key, a collection of articles collated in the book ‘The Song of the Earth — A Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews’, offer background material to the curriculum of the Worldview dimension of both Gaia Education’s face-to-face Ecovillage Design Education programmes and our online Design for Sustainability programmes.
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