HOW A CONVENIENT FICTION WON OUT OVER REALITY

The spiritual view of life is trapped between two opposite words, physics and metaphysics, the study of the physical world and the study of what might lie beyond the physical.

- Deepak Chopra

Given a choice between physics and metaphysics, almost everyone would make the scientific choice, physics. The trap for spirituality is that the two choices are made to seem mutually exclusive.

This is a modern habit that is deeply ingrained—hardly anyone even mentions metaphysics—but relying on the physical world as the foundation of reality has run into serious problems. Unable or unwilling to return to metaphysics, people are stuck without a viable model of reality.

Putting reality on a firm foundation is one of humanity’s driving forces, and ever since ancient Greeks it was supposed that world is like a sandcastle on beach. If you reduce sandcastle to grains of sand, you know where it comes from. Reduce any physical object, and if you reduce far enough, your search leads to atom and beyond.

The problem is the “beyond” part, because over a century ago quantum physics discovered that there is nothing like a minuscule grain of sand from which everything is built. Atoms can be envisioned as a tiny nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. This is a reassuring picture since it makes the atom seem like a miniature solar system. However, this model isn’t the same as reality.