Baha'i Blogcast with Rainn Wilson - Episode 37: Physics and Mysticism with Steven Phelps

my name is Rebecca rice and on behalf of the Baha'i house of worship staff I'd like to welcome you to this special program tonight we are very delighted to host this program on physics and mysticism our moderator is someone that many of you have become fond of through his various projects in life he's an actor on stage and TV he's a producer an author co-founder of SoulPancake as well as lead a Haiti when he's in town he's often made himself available for programs here at the house of worship especially gatherings with our youth in Chicago metro area so we're very happy that rain has made himself available again while he's doing some filming in the area help me give a warm welcome to Rainn Wilson who serve as our moderator hello hi everybody so nice to see you thanks for thanks for coming out tonight I'm deciding whether to stand or sit stand okay I'm gonna go standing thanks so much for coming tonight this is a real pleasure to have this conversation it's with one of my favorite human beings in the world I just love his mind I also love his heart and a little bit I love his body but I am really excited to have this conversation here in Foundation Hall I lived three blocks from here as as a young Baha'i youth when I was 16 17 18 years old right down Linden Avenue and I remember being up here I think the last time I stood here was co-hosting with the Baha'i young youth teens of the area a Holy Day celebration I think it was the declaration of the Bob right in this room it must have been 80 1983 to date myself and I was a security guard here for three months I was the most unintimidating ineffective security guard in Baha'i history maybe even in security guard history because I was 18 and I weighed all of about a hundred and fifty two pounds and but I remember coming in and checking in in the office there I'm putting on my little polyester uniform and security guard shoes and walking around and what an incredible bounty it was what a gift it was to be able to to work here at the mother temple of the West and this this temple really it is the official name is a house of worship which is a title I much prefer a house of worship because it's not a Baha'i temple it's not more pies come to worship this is a house of worship for people of all faiths to come and enjoy to pray to meditate to commune to hear music to hear devotions to have gatherings in the gardens to enjoy so it's a house of worship relief for all people but it was such an incredible time to be spending some times I did the night shift and just walking around the house of worship at night in the moonlight was incredibly beautiful a beautiful time and and now I'm back I put on a lot of weight in my middle-age since those days but are really really happy to be back here and you know this this mother temple of the West bhai is called a magical Oz car which is a dawning place of the mention of God there are several of these all over the world this is the the mother temple of North America of the West and my favorite story about it is involves a woman named Nettie Tobin who was an early early Baha'i we're talking about 1909 about and the Baha'i faith had only been mentioned in North America in 1896 at the first Parliament of world religions and that's when some people started enrolling and in the Baha'i faith so she was a very early Baha'i an extremely poor and she wanted to contribute something to the temple grounds that the land had just been purchased and she didn't even have the money to take the l-train but she wanted to contribute something so she went to a construction site and there was a rock that had been rejected for whatever building that they were building and it was thrown off to the side and she said oh can I use this rock can I use your wheelbarrow or maybe she had a wheelbarrow I noticed there was a wheelbarrow involved and she hosted this big rock up and walked for this with this thing for miles and miles and miles to bring it here for the kind of the opening ceremony it was really before the opening ceremony and I've even heard stories another version of the story that the wheelbarrow broke and that she had to drag it like on a tarp the last part of the way and this rejected don't and they put it out in the middle of the land there was this was before Foundation Hall had been built it was before the the edifice of the building itself had been created and this was kind of the the stone that they would kind of gather around or say prayers and picture like someday there's gonna be a temple here above this stone and the son of the founder of the Baha'i faith abdu l-bahá came to North America for 239 days in 1912 and he he visited the site this was one of the central visits he made across North America and he he blessed the stone he laid his hands on the stone and he consecrated the stone to be the cornerstone of this incredible building which didn't exist at the time there under a tent at the time and he said the most incredible thing when he when he blessed the stone he says now the temple is complete meaning that's all you need to have a holy place to have a holy shrine to have a daunting place for a place for the dawning the mention of God is that stone which was brought with such love and such care and such sacrifice by one of the lowliest poorest members of the Baha'i congregation at that time and it's that spirit that fills this edifice that fills these lands that fills these acreage that fills the hearts of the baha'i that are engaged in service in their community and in discussions like when we're going to be having tonight elevated discussion about some some really fascinating and obscure topics but it all really Springs from a cornerstone of love and sacrifice that very similar to what Nettie Tobin brought to this building and when you're done here tonight I think it'll still be open over here is the cornerstone room somewhere you can actually go see the stone that that I've been to talking about so I'm gonna introduce a good good friend of mine fascinating human being Steven Phelps is coming out here in a minute and he has an extraordinary history he grew up a Baha'i he went to Stanford University where he studied philosophy and physics and then got his doctorate from Princeton fancy in in physics as well and studied cosmology so it's the ultimate physics it's not like physics like what happens to a ball when you roll it down a hill you know this is like how did the universe begin and how do galaxies work and how does gravity and dark matter work on all of these incredible bodies and and systems so and always continued his great love of philosophy so it's a it's a fascinating mind that is halfway between the great philosophers and the great scientists you know for instant university is where Albert Einstein taught so it's the legacy of cosmology being taught in those hallowed halls is is quite extraordinary and then he stupidly went to the Baha'i international center and worked there for fifteen years now I'm just I was totally kidding and and he worked in a variety of capacities that are also really interesting that add to his incredible Catholic interests and that was he was a translator and an archivist and kind of organized the translation work and the documentation of the various writings of the founding figures of the Baha'i faith especially baha'u'llah who was the founder of the Baha'i faith whose name means the glory of God so Baha'u'llah lived in the mid late 1800s over in Persia in the Middle East and was banished all over the place and died in Haifa near Haifa Israel and that's where the Baha'i holy land is in Haifa Israel and that's where the Baha'i International Center is as well where the Baha'i archives are and many of his tablets letters prayers writings books all live there in the Baha'i archives and Stephen has really read most of them there are millions and millions of words that he wrote in these tablets and letters throughout the years so he is fluent in Farsi and in Arabic and if that doesn't make you sick enough because he's such a jerk that he also plays a really mean piano too so maybe if we're lucky enough boy that would be really funny if we really pressured him to go play that piano when he was done but that would be totally unfair but a man of great interests and and working and he's working right now by the way is that has a data scientist you know so many of the startups and tech industries really need to like comb through vast amounts of data to kind of figure out what's going on behind the numbers and they often turn to cosmologists translator philosophers for that work apparently so please welcome up to the stage Steven Phelps hi Stephen thanks for coming thank you did you guys see us okay in these chairs no too bad Stephen Thanks was that the best introduction you've ever gotten pret probably was yeah that's kind of embarrassing very very modest - thanks go figure what a jerk so thanks so much for coming um part of what the highs engage in is elevated conversations about interesting topics that are applicable in some way to the world of service the world of spirituality the world of religion and faith but also social justice and many other topics and this is something that the highs are engaged in all over the world so I I love it me personally as I started a media company that was dedicated to pursuing life's big questions and biggest questions and I was really excited to have just a discussion with you here tonight about some of your ideas obviously they were inspired by and based on the Baha'i faith but they're not necessarily like Baha'i doctrinal ideas you're not and there's no clergy in the Baha'i faith so neither of us represent the Baha'i faith in any way I'm just a kind of a mediocre actor and you're a brilliant thinker but so let's get started by saying we've been having a series of conversations over the last couple of days and it's been it's been really interesting but one a phrase that you used that I really loved was was the anchor less present the anchor less present you remember this phrase and this really has to do with like where we're at as a species these day so another interest of yours as kind of sociology in history in the grand sweep of historical ideas so what does this mean the ankerl is present well one way to think about where we're at and the sweep of history is that it's just a sequence of events with no particular rhyme or reason to them with with no meaning or purpose or direction and a lot of people I think think about history that way and history books then are just convenient ways of organizing chapter by chapter lists of kings and rulers and things like that but another way of thinking about about history is that ultimately there is a direction to it in some vast cosmic sense not necessarily a direction that can be that can be sussed out in in mathematical equations but a direction which nevertheless is visible when we step back far enough and see and see the sweep of movement and evolution in the in the universe and this really begins the anchor list present you know in a sense begins fourteen billion years ago with with the big bang and and and the and the evolution of the of the cosmos seemingly in in random configurations but throughout the this course of cosmic history there is there are islands of stability Islands of order that somehow move against the trend of entropy and chaos and are able to sustain the emergence of life and ultimately of consciousness and for the highs as well as I think for members of all of the great faith traditions of the world life on this planet is not just a meaningless sequence of events but it's driven ultimately by a higher a higher meaning and a higher purpose that has something to do with the emergence of consciousness which really begins even before the emergence of life itself but that really takes a an accelerating turn with with the appearance of life on Earth and with the appearance of human species and and with human civilization and as is often the case as we see in looking back in the archaeological record the the evolution of of living things on this planet seems to take place as periods of relative stability punctuated by these periods of rapid change we see the same sort of thing in human civilization where there have been periods where life didn't really change that much for centuries or thousands of years and then suddenly there's like a a phase transition there's a there's a sudden shift in in consciousness some authors recently have written about this very compellingly like you've all her re is one who writes about in his book sapiens he writes about the the idea of you know a hundred thousand years ago or so abstract thought appears you know in the human species for the first time and it enables us to organize it higher at higher levels and there have been other phase transitions other transitions historically throughout throughout human history we know that abstract thought of it evolved hundred thousand years ago is that like cave art or burial art burial practices are evidence that that even you know that that long ago there was some some idea of abstract thought the fact that that that people were buried with personal implements with flowers and and so forth the writer reza aslan talks about that how humans are obviously wired for transcendence yes wired for the divine impulse because the very earliest signs of humans had to do with making art and also burial and they were always buried with things that they would need for the great journey beyond this physical life so they never just thought of like death as the end for some reason we were wired to think of ourselves on some kind of larger spiritual journey yes and our vision of what form that that larger journey would take has has also evolved and transformed over time and there was a particular time in human history around they say around two hundred eight hundred eight hundred BC Karl Jasper's tags this this area of human history the first axial or the axial age and during this time during the several century period across all of the civilizations on the planet from the Far East of China to India to Persia to to Israel to to the to the ancient Greeks you have the almost simultaneous emergence of a particular way of thinking about the universe which which says that we are in the world but not of the world that we are born into an earthly state and our our purpose is to transcend our material state and and reach a higher spiritual state and this way of thinking it's called axial because it's almost as though there's an axis that runs through the world there's a there's a which establishes the direction of things you know that that things tend towards transcendence and this actual axial picture of the world which was a which was really part of the the foundational way of thinking of people's from that time up until fairly recently came under attack and particularly a few hundred years ago with the Scientific Revolution and with the Enlightenment with when we have emerging for the first time the ability to understand the world based on the application of reason rather than appealing to the presumptive authority of of the past and this led to a kind of a collapse of this two-story structure the idea that there's earth in heaven the idea that there's a material in the spiritual this you talking about as duality that existed in Western yes which we're still thought perhaps best articulated by Descartes in the 1600s it goes under the name of philosophical dualism is maybe the the pinnacle of this of this axial mode of thinking applied to philosophy and this Cartesian dualism this idea that the world is comprised of a physical world of appearances that we can see and also an invisible world behind it is is corroded is perhaps fatally undermined by the advance of science and our ability to understand the world more and more in terms of its appearances without having to appeal to this underlying invisible layer of causes to explain things you know if initially we explained lightning and the waves and the the passing of the seasons and and other things as spiritual forces literally you know by gods are responsible for these things as we understand our environment more and more the space for the operation of the of these invisible spiritual forces is gradually pushed out as as our understanding of the world as purely driven by by natural laws takes over and that kind of brings us a bit to the to the anchor the idea of the anchor list present which is that we're now we're living in a culture particularly the culture of the West which is whose ethics is still grounded in this axial way of thinking but the foundations of it the philosophical foundations of the possibility of thinking in this dualistic way has been seriously eroded by the by the advance of scientific thought and so we end up with like a building with no foundations you know the building is the edifice of judeo-christian morality particularly in in the West and the foundations have been knocked out and so you have a building that's over the last you know century or two and and I think with accelerating force over the last few decades is starting to crumble is starting to topple and and that leads to a kind of a crisis of meaning because well where do we get our meaning if our meaning is no longer grounded in these unchallengeable authorities of the past sacred texts and and sacred and sacred people then where can we recover a ground of of meaning in the world where can we recover a ground of that helps to determine what what actions are the right actions and you were talking before when we were speaking about about how Nietzsche fits into that so Nietzsche god is dead kind of he sums up this this class sums that up he was one of the first people in the in the mid eighteen nineteenth century so I think correctly diagnosed what was going on you know he saw this erosion of of the Christian worldview the philosophical erosion of the Christian worldview from from the Enlightenment he saw that it was that it was no longer tenable and so while I think he more or less correctly diagnoses the ailment I think he incorrectly prescribes the cure you know for him the cure was well let's reject the entire fount edifice of morality that's built then built on top of it let's reject Christian morality as a kind of maybe it's a kind of slave morality that was that was originally put in place by those who were the oppressed group you know within the ancient Roman Empire and and was and was was was developed in order to turn the tables on the oppressors that was how he saw it and so he thought the right way forward and was to reject entirely the Christian morality to go back he had a little bit of a Marxist view of the origins of Christianity that it was ultimately a power struggle simile behind it because so many of the early Christians were were slaves and disempowered peasants yeah I don't know if I'd use the word Marxist really certainly didn't see any divine origin he saw it ultimately as a human as a human invention and and and he thought that the right way forward was to go back to say that the morality of the ancient Greeks you know of the Homeric heroes you know be like Achilles be strong you know be the Superman be the Obermann create your own values you know don't humility is out the window you know the caring about your neighbor you know out the window it's you know be strong and be you know a vital force in the world he saw this as a very positive sort of turn saw it as a very joyful and and energetic and you know kind of a philosophy but ultimately it turns into the philosophy of ultimately it can be used and was used disastrously as we know in the 20th century as a tool for further tool for oppression because you have this idea that wealth is the strong ultimately will dominate the weak and that's and that's the way of things but he had diagnosed the fact that the the the thought that came of age in the in the axial age of this kind of of morality and God was was was collapsing as we entered the Enlightenment and science and reason and logic were replacing God yes he saw it as a collapse but rather than seeing this as a crisis as many have seen it as a crisis you know the crisis of the modern age the the baha'i writings see it more as an opportunity and what makes this an opportunity it's it's that the idea in the first place that the world can be described in these dualistic terms as as a visible physical world material world upon which is superimposed an invisible world and there's some invisible web of causal connections between them this idea of of Cartesian dualism is collapsed by Baha'u'llah by the founder of the Baha'i faith himself when he identifies the the spiritual with the material you know he identifies the the will of God operating which is this invisible realm the primal will with the laws of nature he said there's really the same thing and that for all along it's been a case of mistaken identity to put one label on this and one label on that and to carry for it as if there were two separate things but what we have instead is an idea that that that what we have always considered as the physical and and the spiritual are really two aspects of the same thing ultimately there is one reality one reality that is deeply interconnected and depending on one's viewpoint what either sees it or understands it as spiritual or sees it or understands it as physical it's like it's like this glass of water mmm if you cast the shadow of this glass of water you know on the table you know it looks like a rectangle but if I if I tipped it 90 degrees which which I won't do until I finish it if you tipped it 90 degrees it looks like a circle and so you have this you know reality is this higher dimensional thing and depending on how you orient it the shadow it casts upon a two-dimensional service may look quite different you know a circle in a square or two very different sorts of geometrical objects it's like although our our minds are these two engines that can only contain reality and a limited number of dimensions and we can understand we and some people will always look at reality as the circle and some will always look at it as a square there will always be there are there are different spiritual archetypes in the world there different kinds of perception which are sometimes intrinsic to different kinds of people and sometimes one person may go through these stages themselves mahalo writes about both kinds in his early mystical writings which which he wrote in the 1850s where it is sometimes he takes the the imagery and the and some of the and some of the the stages of the spiritual quest that were that were described by the by the by the Sufis by the Islamic Sufis many centuries before and he recast it for his own purposes and describing the spiritual quest as something which which produces a kind of irreducible diversity of human spiritual perspectives which is a feature and not a bug of the human experience and which one has to embrace on its own terms and which one has to find a way to love and accept everyone all people realizing that everyone is at a different stage at the stage of this spiritual journey and that you have different spiritual types some are always going to see the circle and some are always going to be the square some are going to be very all we see things in terms of the meaning behind it always see things in terms of of God's purpose and things you know always be and their and their personal mode of achieving transcendence is through prayer to an invisible God with whom they have a personal relationship and there are other forms you know equally valid forms of spiritual experience which which look at it as a square with all the angles and the and all of the you know the rules and relationships see things logically you know if they pray it's not so much that they're praying to an invisible personal God but as more as though they're orienting their inner beings to the to the currents that are flowing through the you through the universe and and and and acting upon that inner orientation is is the answer to their prayer in the end it's the same thing it's it produces the same result but it's a different kind of inner orientation it reminds me of the book flatland do you read that yeah that classic book that's a the book that habits very nice two-dimensional world and creatures that inhabit this two-dimensional world and then is it a sphere that goes through the world and so they see the sphere as a small circle and then a larger larger circle larger circle and but they don't have the ability in flatland to see the totality of the sphere their spiritual lessons to be derived from flatland yeah and at a later in a later chapter of flatland one of the one of the the shapes is knocked out of flatland by by a three-dimensional creature and it finds itself sort of circular careening through three-dimensional space and trying to understand what it sees as it looks back on this plane that was you know that was its entire world before that and becomes quite confused so that's like I said death perhaps perhaps that's perhaps that's like I said death perhaps like that's us at certain moments in our lives b'hala describes in back to one of these mystical works called the Seven Valleys one of the later values is called the valley of wonderment which could easily just as easily have been translated the value of confusion or bewilderment and this is you know it's a later stage in the spiritual spiritual journey after one has come to a certain awareness of the the unity underlying all things and that's throws him into this utter state of confusion and I think as I've read and understood it I think one of the one of the reasons for this spiritual confusion is the dawning awareness that the self is ultimately illusory wait what that that the self is an illusion it's it's an illusion which is formed by the temporary existence of our bodies and we think of it as this as a permanent bundle of thoughts perceptions memories virtues and vices and so forth finality personality and but as Mahalo describes the later stages of the spiritual journey particularly as he moves into the the seventh Valley of the Seven Valleys which is this valley of annihilation is the word for it other nothingness he says in that in that state all that the seeker hath from from marrow to skin is burned away until nothing remains but the friend and in and in an earlier sufi work that that's also modeled that from which the Seven Valleys was modeled there's the story of the of the moths and the flame and there were a bunch of moths and a flame and and they wanted to know what it was so they sent one of their one of their members to go and investigate and and the moth came back and described you know the flame and the old moth said he knows nothing of the flame yeah and they sent the moth back it's investigate further and he gets closer and closer and circles around the flame until he in a shower of sparks and flames wings are burned and and he vanishes from sight and then the old moth turns to the other moths and says now now he knows the secret of the flame and the secret of the flame was the the ionization of self a beautiful Baha'i prayer puts this in terms of the the self being like a reed and it's usually full of pith and and one wants to become like a hollow Reed from which this piss of self has been blown so that one may become a clear channel through which grace and the music of the divine can flow through to others and that can only happen when when the self is emptied out well what remains then when the self is emptied out what do we talk about then when we talk about spiritual relationship what what or who has it really is praying to God in the state of utter selflessness well also the hollow Reed that has the pith blown out of it can become a flute that's that's how flutes are made to make beautiful music exactly so the pith of self gets in the way way of the museum music it's in the way the music and so so one of the I guess more potentially I guess so soul shattering things that that I've seen and this isn't actually in the writings of the Bob who is the you know that the co co founder of the Baha'i faith who writes some of them more I think mystically charged and challenging works the Bob writes about the self ultimately that it is a mode of the divine self remembrance and that phrase kind of has to be unpacked a little bit because what do you mean by you know mode of the divine self remembrance and the idea as far as as far as I understand it is that ultimately it if one tries to take you know a thousand steps back and describe what what how do we describe what the universe is what's going on in in the world at the largest scales ultimately it is it is waking up yeah the universe is a constant process of waking up to its own self so it is the continually emerging process of the emergence of self consciousness which is identical to the to the consciousness of God I mean God is what does God mean it's a word that we use to describe these sorts of matters of ultimate concern so we have a circle you have the idea of a circle we have the idea of that of the circle wrote turning upon itself continually it's a dynamic kind of a circle we're all along the circle at some point you know physical evolution is is one part of that circle and cosmic evolution prior to the appearance of life is part of that circle and human social and cultural evolution and individual spiritual evolution is a part of that circle and it's all a matter of it's all can be seen as a mode of the divine self-remembrance in the sense that it all boils down to the self reflecting upon its own reality and its own reality is ultimately a spark of the divine that which lies within us mahalo says he's placed within us the essence of his light there's it's as though we're our souls are all mirrors which reflect you know the light of something far greater so when one realizes it whence when when strips away that pith of self and the own tell the only thing that remains is that reflected image of the divine within the heart then then the answer to the question well who is saying the prayer in the state of utter self surrender and Evanescence who's saying the prayer well it's God saying the prayer to himself you know and then we get bit and then we arrive at that statement by the Bob which which talks about the soul as a mode of the divine self remembrance he I mean he goes on in that in that passage and says you know look at thy thy self thy true self is is God's you know revelation to himself and for himself you know he is thou thyself and thou art he himself except that indeed that he is that he is a now art thou that art so it always ends up being kind of like is then you know on the one hand it's you know eat one once inner spiritual reality is identical to the divine but it's another that's a Christian idea of being created in God's image is that a different it's another say that's another take on that same idea and in some version of this idea of the of self surrender and nothingness and oneness of the divine is going is found in in some at least mystical school of all of the all of the world faith traditions from from native traditions to you know versions of Christian mysticism certainly Islamic Sufism is is based around that and then going east in in in Taoism and Buddhism and in certain schools of Hinduism as well you have this very similar idea of this of the soul ultimately being being a mode of divine reflection and there isn't an element of saying namaste is like I salute the divine within you yes for a perfect example yeah so but we're and we're taught as the highs to look for the divine in other people we see their mere humanity we're going to see their failings in their character devious but we we always search for the spark of the divine well yeah and the person and that's one way of thinking about awareness and acknowledgement and embrace of the principle of the oneness of humanity and the deepest possible sense you can think of you can think of of I don't know going along with the idea that mankind is one the humanity is one in a very pragmatic sense well it's we're one because we're all on this planet together we share it we've got to work together we're almost sapiens we're all homeless that's the one that's that's another level is to say well we're all the same species and we share the same DNA so that would be like a second level a third level of unity would be would be to say something like well you know I I'm like a little flame of the divine I hear a flame of the divine you know we're all you know we're all we all have some some something that we share in common which is which is higher than the physical which is some kind of spiritual essence but I think higher still you know a fourth way of thinking and maybe the deepest way of thinking about the unity of humanity is it's not that we're separate flames but we're actually reflecting the same light so that ultimately in the end there is no true distinction between your consciousness and my consciousness you know the fact that we that were sitting here and talking to each other and that others are in the audience listening to us is is an illusion which is you know which is produced by the by the fact that we're temporarily occupying these you know corporeal forms but what's really happening in the in if you could look into the spiritual realm is basically light is being scattered in all directions you know and it's all light from the same from the same source of course the reality and the day-to-day of life is not that way I mean we're talking at this level where which few in history probably have experienced and and people in general I think maybe only experienced in flashes and so we also have to deal with the pragmatic reality of life which is that we live in a world in which the vast majority of us don't see the world that way and that brings us back to the to the irreducible fact of diversity you know you have spiritual mystical types who love this stuff and who and to read this stuff and who get you know deeply into it and and and and try to approach that state you know to whatever degree they can and you have others for whom that's just not their thing you know that that's not where where they're going and and that's fine it's a feature not a bug of the human condition so how do we produce then you know the pragmatic problem in the world today is how do we produce a community of people who can act together coherently for the greater good of the human race well before we get there because that takes me back to again the first question the anchor lists present so and my take we see the younger generations today for whom depression is up anxiety is up suicide has increased by 30 percent over the last 20 years in this anchor less present we're searching for the truth and searching for meaning while all systems seem to be breaking down around us if you look at all the systems economic system agricultural system I was telling you the other day I was reading that george RR martin the founder of you know the game of thrones had talked about how the system of online fanboys had completely broken down because they were at each other's throats and they're threatening each other and it's like all these are just like geeky fans of science fiction and fantasy and comic books and I think you look system by system by system by system they're all collapsing and as part of a symptom of this anchor less present because aren't there several promises that have been made by science there's promises that have been made by history some grand scheme some grand scenarios some some grand arches of history and that an and promises made by religions that are not working they're not panning out they're not proving to be to be true or useful so that's why one of the many reasons besides social media and and like Angry Birds that society is breaking down yeah was I think Yeats said the you know things fly apart the center cannot hold the you know the Wurster fulfilled with passionate intensity and the best art I can't remember how it goes you know filled in the other artists are sunken that are in this lassitude of inability to move that's where we're at and he wrote this a century ago and and we're and if anything that that crisis has only deepened in the last century and of course we're seeing it particularly you know sharply in very recent years and in rates of depression and suicide and drug overdose and so forth I think to to diagnose this this illness you know as as as as bahala has diagnosed it the OU the illness ultimately is disunity in various forms and that disunity is the primary cause of that of that disunity is as this inability of the spiritual communions of the planet to realize that ultimately there is only one religion and that it's us who have divided it up into separate sects and and followings Baha'u'llah says it's he doesn't even claim that his own message is a new religion to stand alongside the other religions and it's in a kind of a competition for membership for numbers he says it and this set in and one a recent buy statement that Mahalo came to recast the very conception of religion as the principle force impelling the development of consciousness and these sorts of processes take place on the timescale of centuries though I mean we think and naturally on the timescale of decades maybe a human lifetime maybe one generation back because you know that's all the people we know and so we look at the at the at the particularly at the twists and turns in political fortunes and and what's what's happening on the political stage in the in the world today and among the various nations and if if we step back and see the overall motion of things I think we would have more hope it's easy to get caught up in the in the in the crises of the present and and to forget that the great movements of civilization in which we were participating are our centuries in the making and I think one can look for example at this whole process of human civilization from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment you know a few hundred years ago to the present day is really part of one one continual process that has had different sub phases but the overall theme of the process one and I think this can give us a bit of hope is that humanity is passing through a turbulent period of adolescence you know it's it's passed through stages of infancy of childhood in many ways very much analogous to what happens in the you know in the maturation of an individual human being and and we're going through this turbulent period of adolescence in which all of the wisdom of the past is rejected just on principle you know we're gonna figure it out on our own we're gonna make all the mistakes individuation individuation is taking place you know individual human beings are finding the full range of their of their motion and of their autonomy and this is a good thing this is not a bad thing this is not something that we want to turn back the clock on but this is something which is part and parcel of the spiritual collective spiritual evolution of humans on this planet that means there's a lot of pain involved but at the same time one can look as for instance even Pinker has in some of his books you know the looking at the glass being more half-full than half-empty there are you know statistically far fewer wars now than the than the word the past and so on and so forth and all the diseases have been completely eradicated so I think all of this can give us hope for a brighter future for Humanities that on the timescale of centuries we may be on the cusp of the greatest phase transition of all the greatest transformation in human culture and consciousness of all of all which is this emerging dawning awareness of the oneness of the human race and the emergence on to the to the scene of a truly interconnected global society we're already seeing this inevitably emerge on the and the emergence of of technological means of transportation and of instantaneous communication with the Internet within the lifetimes of most people in this room and so there's a there's a great deal to hope for what is lagged is that are the endemic forces of tribalism of nationalism ultimately of various forms of self-centeredness which are still keeping us from making those those essential global connections that can enable a global civilization to to emerge and that's the ultimate purpose of a Bahamas message which is to take the human reality which is by nature quite centered on its own self on on its own physical needs imagine a hierarchy of needs we need to have self-interest the thing to survive right we wouldn't have survived as a species if we didn't have of course it's not a bad self-interest but the center of our being but upon that sort of base layer of the hierarchy of needs one builds the you know the other layers and the higher layers in this hierarchy of needs are self realization and ultimately even higher than that is a realization of of others around oneself this is I think one of the more really profound things that I've seen in the writings of the Bob that there's a very short piece of writing right says that there are essentially three keys to happiness and he says what one of them is the Golden Rule and another one of them is always telling the truth and the third one is never being satisfied with anything over which one has influence when one is aware that it has a higher degree or higher station so repeat that one again alas never being satisfied with anything you know in in ones you know orbit of influence when one is aware that it has a higher station when it has a higher degree and that idea I think fundamentally Orient's helps to orient human consciousness outwards you know it that includes the self it includes you know self-realization and and doing one's best and and and fulfilling one's own potential but it also includes you know everything around oneself starting with one's with one's immediate surroundings you know clean your room etc you know and and be you know and and and be concerned with the environment within which one is embedded and of which one is a part and also people around one one's friends and family and in expanding circles isn't it good happen cerned about that it's kind of a it's kind of a capacity building in a way it's a capacity building and it is ultimately a it is the realization of this ultimately this ultimate goal of creation which is the expansion of consciousness and it's wide as possible in white as possible circles and on this planet that involves expanding ones conciousness until it includes not just every person on the planet with one which which one becomes feels responsible for in some way one feels connected with in some ways but also one's environment so I was talking to my wife about this the other day about how hey hey honey remember when we were like living in Silver Lake and all we had to do in the day was like walk the dog and maybe mail a letter but that was like our entire day and it's all that we could kind of kind of do is like let's have some coffee and and and maybe I'll take a shower and like and we just didn't and like our lives now are so much more just full and rich and yeah there's busy there's a there's a trade-off there too and and stressful and anxiety ridden but you know we're I don't know where I feel kind of good because we're both kind of working towards you know you know working in non-profit or creating art and you know and connecting with more people and whatnot and the things you're doing with with girls education Haiti for example is but I I'm not trying to like ring my own Bell I'm just kind of saying like thank you but I'm just saying that going back you know going back like there was there's been a consciousness raised like what it was it was astounding how how limited our consciousness was about you know what one should and could do in a day for instance I don't know what do I know you know the so the the thing the other thing that you were talking about that that that that that struck a chord with me is that young people these days often get very confused because they see so many great things happening in the world they see a black lives matter movement or a me-too movement you know accelerating the inevitable you know tide of human rights and social justice you know they see you know certain aspects of technology making their lives better and the worlds better there's less war there's less famine there's less people dying on a daily basis so they you know but then they get confused but because at the same time things are falling apart with great rapidity and there's there's climate change and and they're the political system is is at an all-time low everyone kind of agrees on that so many so many terrible things happening to and still so much racism and and hatred and distrust and we feel like much more on the verge of war now than we were you know 20 or 30 years ago even more than than the Cold War so young people don't know where to look and I think you know I think about this bhai phrase about we're in the process of integration and at the same time disintegration so but how Allah talks about you know a new world order being created in an old world order falling apart at the same time and I I think that I've I found that helpful in my own thinking of how to look at the world like there are some really great things and there's some really terrible things happening at the exact same time it's kind of hard to hold both of those dichotomies in one's brain at the same time but I think it is it's it's a really helpful perspective to see that this is kind of our turbulent adolescence that we're going through there are positive things about adolescence adolescence is creative and passionate and and finding one's voice and they're really dangerous dark things potentially about about adolescence yeah it's it's as though we are one can one can find I think oftentimes insights and inspiration and looking at processes in nature which are often mirror images of processes in the spiritual world this is one of the principles in the in the Baha'i writings that there's almost as though there's archetypal patterns that are repeated at different levels and one of those patterns one sees in the forest you know quite quite naturally through natural processes lightning mainly forest fires are you know ignited and sweep through forests and and burn through all of the underbrush and are quite destructive but at the same time forest fires are a necessary part of the life cycle of the forest and in cleaning out the underbrush they they open up the light for you know the seeds of the taller trees to germinate in one way I think one could look at what's the processes of the present day is like a forest fire sweeping through and a lot of things are being burned down there's a lot of destruction of time-honored traditions of sacredly held ideas I mean an example of this I think are the the the new atheist movement you know where there's there's I think a lot and one can support and criticize almost an equal measure what's being you know what's being said in the works of the new atheist because in one sense it is it's quite a great thing and a great service that they're accomplishing in helping to clear away the cobwebs and helping to to really discern what's true from what superstition and it's a great service to clear away those two to see what tall trees remain after the wildfire so you've spent a lot of time studying physics and a lot of time studying spirituality and you've spoken about these two powers of the world a great deal what what are the laws of physics that apply to spirituality or to a spiritual journey or to a spiritual life that's a great question thanks Duke I think a great a great answer was given by a great answer was given by Frank we'll check in his book a beautiful question which was published a few years ago and he's and in this book he examines some of the conceptual pillars of the edifice of modern theoretical physics any identifies these conceptual pillars as as relativity complementarity symmetry and invariance and what can unpack each one of these and it would take a while to unpack those our physics terms but these are physics terms but at the same time they have other other meanings to them and he himself says these ideas these these concepts form the heart of of modern theoretical physics and they should but do not yet form the heart of modern philosophy and spirituality that's what he said yeah yeah and I and I really I really loved that same I appreciated that statement so how would you apply some of those laws to spirituality I think the most obvious one to me is the principle of relativity you know the principle of relativity and physics being that observers in different reference frames that may be moving at different speeds or accelerated reference frames relative to each other will observe space and time and matter and energy in different kinds of proportions and events which may be simultaneous and one reference frame won't be simultaneous and another reference frame so it fundamentally undermines our intuitions about the stability of events and an end of and of space and time but ultimately the the principle of relativity doesn't say well that any set of measurements is equal to any other set of measurements you know there's a limited subset of ways of correctly describing a system and that subset is defined by the internal symmetries you know the fundamental symmetries that that govern that govern and by symmetries I mean roughly the patterns the mathematical patterns that govern that govern events that idea of relativity has a direct parallel and application in the spiritual domain in the principle of the relativity of religious truth which is one of the central teachings of the of the Baha'i faith that doesn't mean relative really just being relativism in the sense that well anything goes now its relativity I think in precisely the same way that that Einstein's special theory of relativity doesn't say any any set of measurements goes you know there's a subset of measurements and and those are related to each other in certain ways but there are different ways of viewing things and those different ways of viewing things can all be valid this principle of relativity in the spiritual domain extends you can think of it as extending just as just as the special theory of relativity in mathematics you can think of the spiritual principle of relativity also as extending in space as well as in time what's the time component of the spiritual principle of relativity it's the fact that from age to age the the spiritual expressions of humanity's encounter the divine have changed you know to put it in fewer words the different religions of the world have quite different social teachings and as well as as well as theological principles and one can either one can either hold that this represents some fundamental contradiction or one can say well there is it there's some invariant principle involved here there's something that remains the same amidst all of these changing forms throughout time from one religion to the other bahala by the way identifies what this is he says everything has changed in religion from age to age except for you says the law of love which like a fountain ever flows and is ever renewed so in time the principle of the relativity religious truth emerges in what Baha'i is often called the idea of progressive revelation but the principle is the spiritual principle of relativity also extends in space as well just like just like Einstein's theory and it extends in space between one heart and another between one person and another because we're all on different stages of the spiritual path together and we all see the truth differently and this is all at once Knapp shot in time and and the to the extent that that wahala says the good deeds of the righteous or the sins of the near ones what does he mean by this you know everyone's on a path and to those who are genuinely on the path and genuinely striving it and and have reached some degree of spiritual awareness nevertheless you know there are others whom one would consider to be completely off base completely wrong and by Allah says that's okay they're actually both correct within their own within their own point of view so that's a principle of relativity that extends in space likewise with complementarity and symmetry one can find corresponding spiritual spiritual principles underlying them it's a fascinating it's a fascinating topic the one that really has has no end it's kind of a rabbit hole there's no bottom when I was a little Baha'i kid and taking Baha'i classes the Baha'i teacher brought in a giant magnet and then all these filings and nails and stuff like that and like hey kids play with the nails and throw them on the magnet we're like wow and then she was like that's love Baha'u'llah says that that's love drawing the nails to the magnet and I was like bull that's uh that's you know that's magnetism that's electromagnetism it's a it's a power she's like no no it's love it says that love holds the planets together and that's what I've little Baja says and so so what is it we you answer this question between me finally between me and my Sunday school teacher is it love or is it electromagnetism please help me out it's it's the same thing that's another manifestation of the principle of relativity there's a there's a beautiful letter of AB the bihari he says it begins love is the secret and it goes on and on describing what love is and of course it's the it's the the the bond that unites the hearts and at some point like you mentioned he said it's the supreme magnetic force that directs the motions of the planets and there's in their in their orbits and taking just sort of taking that as a jumping-off point one then can make the mental exercise of imagining the operation of the forces of love in the universe prior even to the emergence of human beings who experienced love and the way that we normally think about it but Adams experienced love as well through electromagnetism gravity is is is love on the on the most cosmic scale and what does gravity do the gravity pulls elements together and leads to the formation of stars and planets and galaxies and enables the emergence of higher forms of consciousness so one can think of love and consciousness and unity as as three very closely interconnected spiritual principles that at an early stage or at one level can be described perfectly by mathematical laws you know the law of gravity perfectly described by by equations but as as matter becomes organized in higher and higher levels of organization as as life emerges for the first time on the planet first in these unicellular creatures and then and in higher degrees you know plants and animals and finally humans one can think of what's going on here ultimately is that the force and power of love is being manifested in higher and higher degrees and consciousness is being manifested in higher and higher degrees in a way everything is conscious in a in a way you know even the rocks are conscious you know I mean not in the way that the dictionary defines it but in the sense that even a rock has a relationship with the earth an invisible relationship with the earth if you drop the rock it falls to the earth you know it's aware of the earth in some way you know there's a relationship of mutuality there which is which which one could say is consciousness defined at the lowest possible level and at higher levels consciousness as manifested in higher and higher degrees of awareness of the mutuality which ties everything together you're talking about as a rock not the rock yes I just wanted just wanted to be clear yes because you drop the rock - he'll fall down and hit the earth as well but exactly and and as abdu l-bahá says trying to ignore that comment as as a papa also says this interconnectedness that Bond's everything together is the very definition of religion he says that's what religion is in the end you know religion consists in the essential relationships that derive from the realities of things says that's what it is and it's it's strangely enough in another place he talks about love and this isn't the same love as the secret letter he says love is the essential relationship that binds together the realities of things and it is still another place where he talks about nature he says nature it are these and it consists in the essential relationships that derive from the realities if you know what it sounds like what you're describing it sounds like the DAO kind of because you're saying love is unity is consciousness is religion yes is that what binds things together things together and that is the taoist would say that that that's the DAO christians might call it the holy spirits I mean it has different words in different in different religious traditions mm-hmm no it's it's a it's the invisible ties that bind that draw towards that draw everything towards towards the source and how does this go back to your circle analogy that you start is everything you know the circle is this imagery that everything proceeds or emanates it's it's an old idea actually from Phillip plump Latinas who was a pagan philosopher during the late Roman Empire who was the first to really articulate this idea of emanation the idea that everything is an emanation from what he called the 1 and the 1 was this principle of infinite goodness of infinite truth of infinite beauty all three at once which which emanates the world in successive in successive degrees this idea of emanation and then return is taken up by you know it's caught the thread of this idea is caught historically by the by the by the Mystics of Islam who really develop it even further but isn't it the Buddhist Wheel the Wheel of Life from Buddhism is is the same thing in that yes this imagery of the circle that's turning on itself has maybe even earlier manifestations in the in the figure of the aura borås the snake that's swallowing its own tail which one finds surprisingly a sort of incredibly again across different ancient cultures which which apparently had no connection with each other so this this imagery is you know deeply embedded in human consciousness has been used in a variety in a variety of cultures and it and it all gives it one can one can see it as all as manifestations of this of this common idea that there is a continual everlasting process of emanation and return you can say it's emanation from God and return to God using that language but this is just that's one that's one narrative language or one narrative framework that you can use you can also use a narrative or sacred you know language as one does in the in the philosophies and traditions of the East it doesn't make a direct reference to the sort of to the God of the of the monotheistic traditions but it's the same idea it's the same idea ultimately of of the soul coming to a an awareness of its own essential divinity and being lost and absorbed in that in that divinity which is the same as the Ray returning returning to the son and ultimately that's that's what religion is you know it's it's the love of the creature for the Creator you know but to say that sentence is already causing because our teacher is that creator as a creature is a creator and so this is a problem with language you know it's a it's a snare that is meant to catch only certain kinds of rabbits you know this is actually a statement by John so one of the Great Eastern philosophers he says you know a fishnet is made you know to catch fish and once you've caught the fish you can throw away the net you know a rabbit snare is made to catch rabbits and once you've once you've caught the rabbit you can throw away the snare words exist to capture meanings and once you've captured the meanings you can get rid of the words because ultimately the words are not equivalent to the meanings and that's very much the case when it comes to all of these spiritual subjects that we're talking about anything that lies above the realm of the directly observable which is just about everything we've been talking about tonight you know no one has direct access no what no one can say this is actually how it is with the spiritual world all we can do is use words to try to build models of reality which we hope are useful which we hope can solve a problem which we hope can be a remedy for the illness of the of the age which is how pahala describes his own message he doesn't describe his message as an eternal unchanging truth in a way it is in the sense that it embodies this law of love which is eternal and unchanging but in another way he describes his own message as a kind of remedy you know he says I'm the divine physician says I've I've diagnosed the the illness of the here and I have prescribed the remedy and the remedy in this day for the particular illness of the human race is unity it's the recognition of the unity of the human race and this is the second axial age that we are potentially going through right now in humanity's adolescents leading hopefully not to our destruction or you know or you know you're not death or overdose in rehab but but actually humanity's coming out on the other side and I think you mentioned it very well when we started that this shift in consciousness from from self to other yes that shift in consciousness for himself to other is mirrored yet that that's at an individual level a way of mapping out the the stages in the spiritual and the spiritual quest and that is mirrored in the in the development of human civilization collectively you know from in from family units to tribal units to city-states to nations to empires you know in in these expanding circles which are only made possible when human beings are able to identify with people in larger and larger groups in a way that that retains some kind of solidarity this is a topic that I think Harare deals with very very well that it requires an enormous intuitive leap abstract leap one could call it a spiritual leap just just need to use that that word to recognize the abstract idea of membership in a group that contains people whom one might not have met personally it's it's kind of an interesting thing when you when you realize oh this is a thing yet in that higher this is actually a thing there was a time in human civilization where you could use where the tribal the size of a tribe was limited to the number of people you knew personally right because you have to trust people in these right and these prehistoric societies yeah you can't you have to be sure they're not gonna stab you in the back or do whatever that can be done because there's no the valleys the valley people and the mountain people are right trust the menthe mountain be and and sociologists have found that that the human even a fair constant throughout history is that we're capable really only of having about 150 friendships it's called Dunbar's number and you know for the sake of argument it's around 150 which sets the limits of the size of a tribe in you know way back in time until this conceptualist abstract leap of being able to understand the concept of membership in a tribe maybe from the clothes that you wear or a tattoo that you might have that you that you might have put on or any other identifying marks which is an abstract signifier of membership in a larger group so you see someone with you know wearing those clothes you realize oh they're part of my tribe it's it's a very that still exists today it is forgetting he's got a dunder mifflin t-shirt so I was a member of the tribe I I recognized him as a member of a tribe there so this in my experience is by how Allah's message of seeing the divine in in all of us that we are all to quote a hard day Chardin you know we're all spiritual beings having a human experience and that this grows that number past 150 or even 150 thousand or even 150 million but to encompass 7 billion lights of God 7 billion emanations of the divine all around the planet and we have to unite in that way or will perish and objects that we those that are members of the genus species are part of this vision of the everything which reflects to some degree the light of the divine images which is included in the totality of the vision of one essence is our environment that's beautiful thank you very much Steven Phelps let's give it up thanks for thanks for speaking with me this evening what a what a beautiful wooden exquisite mind and I learned so much and always get so much out of out of speaking to you so do we we have time for a few questions before we finish off we have a look at that microphone is making its way to the center aisle does anyone have any questions for dr. Phelps for yourself or maybe me who knows oh and then we'll force him to play the piano door done no chance no chance yes sir so this is about string theory Brian green I think was the author who wrote elegant universe it's published in the mid 90s I've been reading that and in the later chapters he he takes the mathematics of string theory and it begins to point to something like well wait a minute what about no space no time that was pointing that in the direction of something of that ilk and of course my ears perked up immediately knowing that the next world is quote sanctified from time and space end quote so I'm not asking you to answer that question definitively but I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts on it and I'm also curious to what extent the fifteen years later string theory is still being researched and investigated I know a lot about silly string theory you know those cans you shake and they spray and so maybe when you're done with this one yeah string theory is definitely so thing a lot of people are still working on it it's unclear whether it is it is it is the it is the thing but there I think there is a temptation to take certain more or less speculative ideas from modern physics and to try to map them on to our ideas about what in the spirit world might be for example string theory posits the existence of extra dimensions which are which become compacted in some way and and are invisible to the eye and it's tempting to think that while somewhere in those extra dimensions lies the invisible realm of the spirit or another example is dark matter you know we know that the universe is comprised predominantly of some dark form of matter that has never yet been detected it directly and a detector but has only been seen indirectly and its influence on galaxies and furthermore that there's dark energy and there's even more of that which is even harder that is even harder to detect and it's tempting to say well that must be the invisible spiritual dimension that is within us and surrounds us that our that our instrument and our scientific instrumentation is unable to detect and I personally don't know but I I am I am suspicious of these ideas because to me it tends to turn what I believe ultimately transcends the physical into something which becomes very material it it it strikes me as a very material way of interpreting spirituality whereas to me spirituality is not so much an invisible dimension of the physical that that's that somehow there but can't be seen I think if I think of spirituality more as as a higher degree of consciousness or awareness it's it's manifested in us whenever we think it doesn't require dark matter it doesn't require 26 dimensions or 11 dimensions or whatever it just requires a higher degree of awareness and that that's what spirituality is to me and that makes I don't think that makes it any less real than if one were to find a mathematical formulation of it my name is Rachel thank you guys both for being here today rain I follow you on Instagram and I saw I was very curious about a story that you posted about a month ago where you pointed to a piece of land behind you and you said why do we have borders why can't we all just get along and I was thinking about that tonight as we we're talking about selflessness and this selfless anchor so my question is how can we protect our land or even more on a personal level how can we protect what we believe like politically or religiously while being selfless and not becoming too vulnerable thank you for that question that's very thoughtful yeah I was in the South of France and then I was staying right by Italy and it was like it just seems so ridiculous that I was on this one promontory that was France and then the other next promontory over was Italy and I was kind of pointing out kind of on the phone kind of like how silly that is how many wars have happened between these two promontory z-- how many armies have marched between these two lands how how many other demarcations there are between lands and between countries in between nations and to me it just it just feels silly I felt the same thing when I went down to Mexico and I saw you know the walls and the barbed wire that had been built in the and that the border checkpoints and stuff like that now I'm not suggesting an instantaneous elimination of all borders and everyone does it's a free-for-all a lawless free-for-all where everyone goes wherever they want that's not what I'm suggesting but a higher consciousness where you know nationalism kind of has been a humanities Clarion cry for hundreds of years you know my nation and and then that kind of simmered away for a while and now it's coming back and we're seeing it not just here in America but a lot of European countries in other countries where you know our nationalistic impulses is so strong and what bajas are working towards is you know seeing all of humanity as the flowers of one beautiful garden of humanity on this earth and that we need to drop away again all of these differences that plague us and look for the similarities that doesn't mean that we all become the same the Baha'i faith teaches unity and diversity so we have to honor the great diversity exists among the races among the cultures what every culture brings to the table it's a it's a variegated beautiful garden but we have to it's a it's part partially shifting our perspective and the problems that we're facing are no longer national problems you know we're not dealing with the problems of polling there Austria Hungary or Portugal or something like that we're dealing literally with a crisis an international crisis and the scale of which we've never seen before which is climate change this crosses all borders this doesn't have to do with you know well you know we here in Bolivia have done X Y & Z problem solved that's not how it's going to work humanity has to take its next step in its great evolution through its painful adolescence to again view get out of us me we kind of thinking and and open up our consciousness to you know the greater human family so thanks thank you yes hi so you talked a little earlier about how science and philosophy complement each other when you were talking about love science and philosophy or okay sorry no problem yeah but I was wondering do you ever find there are times when science and spirituality kind of contradict each other and there's a struggle between the two I think if it's true science and true spirituality I think they're by definition compatible so if one finds a contradiction between them what what I would do is ask well is this is this either pseudoscience or is this superstition masquerading as spirituality and there's a lot of that in the world today well so the next question that is well then how does one determine you know it just won't have a litmus test to to determine what is true spirituality from false spirituality and I think the best litmus test we have ultimately is well the litmus test that was given in the Bible you know by its fruits you know you tell if it's you you tell if it's the right thing if it leads to a greater awareness and and greater degree of love if it does I don't I don't see how it came contradict science and I'm open to hearing examples but I'm not aware of any hi my name is Angie um so I don't necessarily ascribe to any one religion but I'm very happy to be here today and thank you so much for this wonderful discourse I've been very enthralled to say the least so essentially I actually heard about this religion actually a few years back I would say four or five years ago Green you were actually a guest on the Tim Ferriss podcast and had mentioned bhai which was actually my first introduction and then mr. chard mentioned today's event so I hear him today thank you Tim Ferriss yeah and so I guess I had this initial spark uh in terms of interest when you had first mentioned it and anyways not to dive into that too much I guess my question is and I apologize if it's not well formulated I study medicine not physics or philosophy though during a lot of my free time I like to read a lot about quantum physics specifically philosophy and quantum physics so you had mentioned a lot of natural order and you touched a little bit on like dark energy and dark matter and not to dive too much into that but you just to take a little step further in terms of like on a more subatomic whole level when order is lost as we have found how would you I guess like tie that to how we perceive the world and how its experience if on a subatomic level things lose order and nothing makes sense and it kind of ties into an earlier thing you had mentioned which is that everyone's perception is different and so if you kind of go along the lines in quantum physics if it's the powers kind of within the beholder and how you perceive things actually alters the physical world so I'm not going to talk anymore but in terms of quantum physics and the loss of order on a subatomic level how would you explain experiencing the physical world hard to know exactly how to how to reply to that 27 right it's I think there is again there's there's a temptation to take the ideas of quantum physics and particularly the principle of complementarity which is the weirdest idea and most counterintuitive idea which says that the state of a system will be determined in some way by how you choose to measure it so if you set up an experiment to to detect particles you're gonna find particles and you set it up if you set it up to detect waves you're going to find waves shooting course cannon shooting gears cat right Schrodinger's cat and all of that and there's a there's a great I think temptation to take that and to say well I literally will change reality when I look at it you know in the same sense that a quantum system has changed and I think this is where I think one has to be a little bit careful in drawing a line between using the principles behind quantum mechanics such as complementarity as like an archetype that that has the from which one can draw certain spiritual or philosophical insights versus versus using quantum mechanics our thinking of thinking that that literally you know in the sort of scientific measurement sense at quantum effect can can be real at a macroscopic level I'm one of the well-known result of corn to make mechanics is that the the the the interconnectedness the tangled nests of quantum systems at an atomic level D coheres once you once you reach macroscopic levels and so there are a lot of people and writers who talk about quantum effects at the macroscopic level but as far as I am I am aware those have not been those have not been validated you know by by science thank you so much my name is Helene Laimbeer and I have listened to many of the talks of the New Atheists and I also have known many atheists throughout my life I have always loved to present the ideas on the unity of science and religion how religion and science can be defined in the same terms and the high writings and so in these conversations sometimes the the materialist atheist or otherwise secularists will define science in such a way that they don't accept my religious embrace of science and one example of this is even in the world of physics string theory was mentioned earlier where some scientists have you have even heard some physicists say string theory hasn't even produced predictable or reproduce any kind of experimental predictions and weaken text in the laboratory and therefore it cannot be called a scientific theory and they're clearly defining science in a particular way that is much more stringent than the way I understand science when shoghi effendi says that Bob the Baha'i faith is scientific in its method right as shoghi effendi has said and also the other principles of the unity of science and religion so i am curious about your perspective on how a Baha'i might define science that might reach across the divide toward those other scientists who perhaps are really skeptical of spiritual thought of religious thinking and any notion of the existence of a god right and in trying to reach across that divide in my conversations and particularly around the definition of what science is and how it relates to the pursuit of knowledge I think Carl Sagan's said it really well when he said science is more of an approach to the world than it is a body of knowledge and if we take that as a starting point you know the idea that science is a way of approaching the world how does it approach the world it approaches the world analytically it it it approaches the world with humility you know that one doesn't have access to all information to all data but what one does have access to that the data that one can collect the observations that one can make one creates models that that describes those observations and hopefully that is not in contradiction with any other any other observations and if it's a good theory it can also make some predictions so it's useful for something you know it it fully describes the data that you've collected and perhaps it can be used to predict something beyond that that's the those are the those are the hallmarks of a good scientific theory and although science utilizes the language of mathematics to make those observations and theories one can think and and apply this this analytic scientific kind of approach to spiritual topics that that do not submit to the microscope and do not submit to being reduced by equations but you can still have the scientific approach and what do I mean by that you know as an example you know if one thinks of if one takes this image of the cosmos that I was that I sketched out that it's like there's a circle of being and it's all about consciousness and consciousness is constantly is constantly evolving and constantly coming to know itself into an out of existence on this planet and elsewhere throughout the universe that's a statement which perhaps has some physical implications first of all does it contradict anything any other observations I'm going to claim that it doesn't contradict any other other conservation but I'm open to hearing you know physical evidence that contradicts this view of things but what I think makes it interesting and as of maybe as I'm not going to call it a scientific theory but which it gives it the same kind of the the same kind of purchase as a scientific theory is that it actually actually makes a prediction and the prediction that this view of the universe makes is that if life is somehow built into things if consciousness is somehow going to emerge in a purposeful way you know that it's that it's that it's somehow meant to emerge then one would expect to find life and consciousness everywhere that it's possible to find it because it's a tendency of life is a tendency of matter then we have a prediction and the prediction is as we start investigating other worlds and other planets we should start finding life and intelligence and consciousness and various degrees on other planets not necessarily civilize life on every single planet we're not looking for civilizations on Mars or something like that but were but we're looking for and expecting to find traces of life in greater abundance than if we didn't have this theory you know if we didn't have this theory then we might expect life to be extraordinarily rare we might expect that the fact of life on this planet and intelligent life on this planet is so extraordinarily rare that the only thing that can explain it is the fact that the universe is infinitely large large enough for all of the possible combinations of things for every roll of the dice to have been made so that so that this you know this fantastically rare thing of us emerging could possibly happen that's kind of the best science can do without there being some undergirding principle of life emerging where where it can but if we take this as you know and think of it scientifically as you know and and and subject it to the same kind of of scientific analysis we say okay make a prediction I'll say okay this is the prediction there's going to be life on other planets probably intelligent life you know whether we observe it and detected in our lifetimes don't know but I think it's possible that within our lifetimes we may make the first observations perhaps through the the signatures in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets of combinations of elements that have no other reasonable explanation to us except that there must be some life process going on so that's just one example I think it'd be really cool to be like the Star Trek universe maybe who knows you know but I always thought Star Trek was very similar to the Baha'i faith right yeah yes and logic kind of compared oh I and so where do you feel like maybe there's like balance between the two in a way because like balance between creativity and logic to have chronological thoughts that you need kind of a creative process and and I feel like they're similar but like they're also completely different and it's confusing sure well the words I mean the word logic actually okay so well the word logic comes from the Greek for logos and logos is the word that appears in the in the first verse of the Gospel of John in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God that's a kind of a cosmological statement which is repeated in in it way in the Baha'i writings and and and I think in other traditions as well and the word logos is is translated as word but it can also be translated as ordering principle and it comes from the same root as logic and so there's this idea a spiritual idea that the originating principle of things is fundamentally logical because it orders in structures things and so there's a there's a cosmic reason to believe that logic is a thing and that it's not just a thing but it's you know one of the most key you know one of the key principles of the you know of the of the world and likewise creativity because this lot this logos the the one of the platanus is an infinitely creative force and it's creative in the sense that it is it is eternally emanating in infinite forms it's as though the the one wants to be known in as many ways as possible you know and so it creates every possible combination of things because that's how one that's how it can it can be best known and loved you know in that sense is just off the top of my head that's how something like logic and creativity then in this you know cosmic vision of things are are closely intertwined and and are both I don't know Pillars of the Pillars of the order good answer great hi I apologize because my question isn't very simple so it might kind of need a lot of answering but I mean you are mentioning how everything is in order you know us you know looking here at the most complex form of order and consciousness and so do rocks and minerals you know and they have their own sense of order and this order has a purpose you know evolutionary wise you know everything has a purpose to fulfill you know the the rocks you know I was reading in the writings you know the rocks their purpose to fulfill is to exist and they do so well and you know the purpose of the vegetable kingdom is to is to spread life and to grow reproduce and you know purpose of the animal kingdom you know keep the ecosystem in check predators you pray pray you know fulfill that need and so being here you know looking at us as you know at that most complex form of consciousness and order how can we scientifically and religiously spiritually as well you know unified in that answer explain our purpose on this world so how can we explain our purpose in light of of every physical thing having a purpose yeah I mean you know looking at the world poverty war disunity you know global warming pollution aren't these all manifestations that we're doing something wrong and that there is a purpose that we all need to fulfill so how can we explain this one way to put it in you know in the context of today and in the context of the you know the the critical junction that humanity is currently in is that our purpose is to recognize as fully as possible the spiritual unity of the human race and to be catalysts for the the wider acceptance and emergence of this as as a principle undergirding you know the civilization that that that we're building you have the global civilization that that is emerging that sums it up for me and and that's you know that also can be summed up that itself can be summed up in a single word which is which is love but isn't that also the quote from the bob of raising something up to its highest potentiality yes like the highest potentiality of a rock rocks get buried or become coal and then get crushed and become diamonds like its it becomes its highest state of itself and humanity both individually and collectively are striving to become the equivalent of the rock becoming a diamond whatever that is to be a source of light a source of heat healing a source of emanation of love and and unity and that's that's the highest state that that we can we can strive for yeah the Baha'i writings say that the human reality should be seen as a mine which is and gems of inestimable value and it's it's it's education that that mines yeah and brings these gems to light within the the inner reality of the of the human being you know another way of thinking about our purpose is discovering what those gems are and and the mining you know comes with effort well two questions sorry sorry you only get one I'll combine them then the concept of emanation purity you know they were talking about the concept of emanation and within the same writing bahala talks about the concept of pre-existence and the first intellect so that's before creation I wanted to know your perspective of it and that in continuation the hollow tells us that manifestations have the knowledge of God so they pretty much know everything about science but they can only give us what we understand mahalo gave us the concept of splitting the heart of adam and long behold you would find the sun and finally we were able to see that happening by smashing atoms together but another concept that I'm curious about after the creation is this writing that bahala at which you touched on it briefly I just want to get a little bit more glam software sciences right now in regards to this he says in gleanings that no doubt that every fixed star had its own planets and every planet its own creatures whose numbers no man can compute so that's several could the answer that that second question I was like five wow that was a lot of questions well partially answer a couple of them I guess one is that yet so there's the same in Bible ha it's my my proposal that this picture of life is being emergent it's about intrinsic to to the universe leads us to expect that we're probably gonna find life elsewhere is of course inspired by that quotation that you just that you just read where the founder of the Baha'i faith themself says there's life elsewhere as far as I know you know the first prophet historically to talk about life on other planets and and their other their many other places in the Baha'i writings that also mention that this life is conscious to some degrees so so there there is that your point about the well your question about emanation and pre-existence and so forth just made me want to reiterate that that all of the language we use to describe anything beyond the world of appearances is ultimately going to fail at some point at best is going to be a model that should be taken for what it's worth and what it's worth is determined by how useful it is in the world and is it going to solve a problem and if it solves a problem to talk about the different degrees of divine emanation you know beyond this material world to the you know to the ultimate essence then then you know let's build that model and I'm not sure how useful it is you know because ultimately we don't know what's beyond there one of the principles of the of the Baha'i writings ultimately is that that divine reality that that we have that has been called God is ultimately beyond all names and attributes which is to say it is actually beyond the attribute of singleness versus plurality it's beyond the attribute of existence versus non-existence it's beyond the attribute of being an object of knowledge versus being the subject that's that's doing the that's the that's acting and knowing and so for this conception of the divine which transcends all of the categories of thoughts which breaks all of the rules of grammar you can't use language without forcing this concept into the categories of language nouns verbs adjectives subjects objects and if the reality that ultimately we're trying to grasp cannot be captured in those categories you know it's a it's a net you know grammar is a net that's designed to catch fish and we're trying to capture the water with the net you know it can't be done and and which isn't to say that there's a you know that there may be a great deal written in the faith traditions of the world in the Baha'i writings itself about the relationship between these different degrees of spiritual existence ultimately we have to just to step back with with some humility and realize that that we have no way of determining what's true or false in these things and ultimately we should we should judge them based upon upon their usefulness thank you again dr. Steven Phelps give it up thanks very much for coming you guys thanks so much there's a lot of fun [Applause]

Channel: Baha'i Blog

Views: 54,187

Keywords: bahai podcast, bahai interview, bahai blog, bahai blogcast, Rainn Wilson, Steven Phelps, Bahai audio, bahai conversation, bahai discussion, religion, science, spirituality, science and religion, physics and mysticism, creation

Id: VZjv0bVA8u8

Length: 106min 8sec (6368 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019