Amy Corzine - The Secret Life of the Universe: The Quest for the Soul of Science

There is an invisible way across the sky, Birds travel that way, the Sun and Moon And all the stars travel that path by night.

Kathleen Raine

P erhaps i should begin with an ending. At the end of his book, Gifts of Unknown Things, about communal organic magic on an Indonesian island, Lyall Watson conveys how the universe continually replenishes itself. The dancing islands most special dancer loses her powers to bring under control the natural elements and heal her communitys problems, and so the force needed by the island moves to another child. Thus life goes on, ever replacing what is lost.

One of my early glimpses of this came many years ago when I attended the last lecture in the professorial career of the late Indian philosopher-writer Raja Rao. He had almost single-handedly drawn me out of a post-adolescent depression by conveying, through the philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, a quality until then missing from my experience. Summing up his career as well as his talk, he asked, What is the end? Accustomed to his abbreviated circular inversions, I queried, The beginning? I will never forget his liquid eyes as he replied, And every beginning is an end. Both exist in each moment.

Buddhist lamas often describe existence as being like the reflection of the moon upon water. Some people say the universe is infinite, unfathomable, while scientists plot their way through it, step by step, making material use of its mysteries in a way that visionaries and mystics do not.

As Sufi writer Reshad Feild once told me, it is all old information. There is nothing new to find. It is just a matter of uncovering it. And what are we uncovering? Michio Kaku, in his book Visions, suggests that scientists are discovering what will soon enable us to become masters of matter itself. Ironically this poses the greatest threat yet faced by humanity, while at the same moment presen-ting it with the greatest gift of power we have ever had.

The possibility we might function as masters of matter ensnares our concept of what we know as God. Does the universe contain a force that is separate from visible, material bodies, enabling living creatures to be alive and awake? Is this a power we will ever be able to harness?

We are not in control of everything, often not even ourselves. So how are we connected to this vast universe? Does an ocean of microscopic vibrations link everything like some invisible web? Are we part of some vast field of energy or consciousness? Theoretical physics has brought us back to a perception of reality resembling that of many of the worlds past natural philosophers, scientists and pagans. For followers of Wicca or Wyrd, all that we are, and all that happens, is based on past actions.

The metaphor of the Web of Wyrd [illustrates] how the actions of individuals can have widespread effects If we imagine the universe as a big spiders web and that each node where two strands meet represents an event (or a person, or a life) we can visualize the interconnectedness of things.

Our predecessors left behind medical systems and lifetimes of research based upon the notion that everything affects everything else. Prehistoric man may well have perceived things that we in our physically comfortable modern world have never known.