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Contact The Study Society Newsletter Seeking a grand unification of matter, mind and spirit S. M. Jaiswal The Games Mouravieff & the secret of the source Meditating with your children No. 61 Summer 2013 FREE TO MEMBERS, OTHERS £5.00 Contact The Study Society Newsletter Question about loss of direction Question: What is the right effort involved in remembering what one has forgotten? Dr. Roles. I think it is to be silent for a moment. In that silence one collects oneSelf – one comes to oneSelf. It seems to be the one effort that works, for a sense of direction comes from within. One aspect of this is to give up all problems, all thinking, all mental activity and do what you have to do as if you were under orders – simply stepping out when you are walking, unlocking a door with attention, nothing else going on at all. That is so very refreshing; one is just a servant of the Param-Atman. This becomes very interesting if you take the Gospels psychologically. You remember Christ saying: Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7: 21–23) Now meditators, just doing empty repetition, just repeating the Name, are saying ‘Lord, Lord’. But what counts is, do they use the Meditation to do the Will of the Param-Atman, the Divine Self, the Christ, or whatever you like to call it? ‘Doing the Will’ is not allowing anything to come between the action and the Director. FCR 1977/15 Cover: Mount Athos. Monastery of Gregoriou, 14th cent. dedicated to St Nicholas (Photo: Wikicommons) CONTENTS 3. Seeking a Grand Unification of Matter, Mind and Spirit Prof. Bernard Carr 10. A Precious Gift — Meditating with your Children Kim Nataraja 14. Answers Mother Meera 15. The Olympic Games Michael Griffiths 18. The Misunderstanding about Self-remembering Francis Roles 21. S.M. Jaiswal — a Man for our Season Gerald Beckwith 23. Mouravieff & the Secret of the Source Robin Amis 29. Tribute to Jocelyn Rose Martin Rose 30. A View of Launde Abbey Rev. Alison Christian 32. Glad Living Wei Wu Wei 33. Book Reviews 4 Page INSERT Diary & Events Seeking a Grand Unification of Matter, Mind and Spirit Bernard Carr is Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London. His professional area of research is cosmology and includes such topics as the early universe, black holes, dark matter and the Anthropic Principle. He has recently edited a book entitled Universe or Multiverse?, based on a series of conferences sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. He has a long- standing interest in the relationship between science and spirituality and also in psychical research, which he sees as forming a bridge between them. He aims to extend physics to incorporate con- sciousness and associated mental, psychical and spiritual phenomena. His approach is mainly theoretical but emphasises the experiential as well as experimental aspects of nature. He is a former President of the Society for Psychical Research and currently Chairman of the Scientific and Medical Network. THE MISSING JEWEL IN THE CROWN OF PHYSICS Physics might be regarded as the queen of the sciences and there can be no doubting its remarkable success in coming to understand the material world from the smallest scales of particle physics to the largest scales of cosmology. In particular, it has revealed a remarkable unity about the Universe, with everything being made up of a few fundamental particles which interact through four forces which are now thought to be part of a single grand unified interaction. Indeed, the history of physics might be seen as the progress in our understanding of this unification. It is even claimed that the end of physics is now in sight, in the sense that our knowledge of the fundamental laws and principles governing the Universe is nearly complete and that we are close to obtaining a ‘Theory of Everything’. So the rationalist, reductionist, materialistic approach of the physical sciences appears to have been triumphant! Another success of physics has been to explain the development of the dazzling array of increasingly complex FIGURE 1. This shows the hierarchy of scales of structure in structures in the 14 billion years since the Big Bang. This is the Universe, with the size increasing by a factor of 10 for each encapsulated in the image of the Uroborus, shown in anticlockwise minute. Mind may enter where the head meets the Figure (1), which shows the intimate links between the tail at the top and extra dimensions may also play a role here. microscopic domains (on the left) and the macroscopic ones (on the right). The point at the top (where the very scientists assume that the study of such topics is beyond large meets the very small) corresponds to the Big Bang, their remit altogether because science is concerned with a while the point at the bottom (human beings) corresponds ‘3rd person’ account of the world (experiment) rather than a to the culmination of complexity – at least here on Earth. ‘1st person’ account (experience). They infer that the focus However, Figure (1) also reveals a missing jewel in the of science should be the objective world, with the subjective crown of physics. For among the remarkable attributes of element being banished as much as possible. This goes human beings are consciousness, mind and spirit. It is also back to the Cartesian divide between res extensa (the striking that the Uroborus can be used to represent the domain of science) and res cogitans (the domain of religion) expansion of consciousness through scientific investigation in the 17th century. to ever larger and smaller scales. So it is curious that these Yet it seems profoundly unsatisfactory that the contents attributes are almost completely neglected by science and of the mental world are neglected by science. After all, indeed judged to be without significance. The mainstream these comprise roughly half the contents of our view is that consciousness has a purely passive role in the consciousness and even our experiences of the material Universe, minds are just the froth generated by billions of world are ultimately just mental. So the claim that physics neurons, and spiritual evolution is a delusion. In fact, most is close to a theory of everything seems a rather hollow one. 3 One could, of course, maintain the validity and value of required and would it be the kind that mainstream science mental experiences in their various forms but just regard would recognise as legitimate? them as being beyond science. However, as a working Some forms of psi – a general term for psychic scientist I find this attitude rather defeatist. For science phenomena – might conceivably be amenable to a assumes that the world is governed by natural laws and – reductionist brain-based explanation. Telepathy, for given the success of the enterprise so far – it seems instance, might derive from some unknown signalling plausible that mental and spiritual experiences are also process between two brains, while psychokinesis (PK) and subject to such laws. Our aim should therefore be to clairvoyance might depend on some little understood demonstrate that natural law can be extended to include exchange of energy between the brain and its physical these areas and not to throw the ball back into the court of environment. However, apart from various technical the ‘supernatural’. One expects science to have some limits objections, these sorts of explanation seem unlikely but one does not know what they are in advance and the because psi also involves other types of phenomena which lesson of history is that one should try to push its frontiers would appear much less amenable to a brain-based forward as far as possible. explanation: for example, near-death experiences, out-of- But how feasible is it that physics can accommodate body experiences, death-bed visions, the evidence for consciousness and associated phenomena? Clearly survival of bodily death and the whole domain of mystical physics in its classical mechanistic form cannot achieve this, experience. These are examples of the sort of ‘rogue’ since there is a basic incompatibility between the localised phenomena which support the view that the brain is a filter features of mechanism and the unity of conscious of experience rather than a generator of it. So the sort of experience. However, the classical picture has now been physics we want is probably not of the usual reductionist replaced by a more holistic quantum one, and some people kind. have argued that this can include consciousness. For I believe that a new paradigm – involving a radically example, studies of quantum phenomena convinced Louis different sort of physics, which I call ‘hyperphysics’ – will de Broglie that ‘the structure of the material Universe has eventually reconcile psi and physics and throw light on something in common with the laws that govern the each of them. Indeed, the fact that physical reality has workings of the human mind’, while John Wheeler turned out to be so far removed from common-sense inferred that ‘mind and Universe are complementary’. reality has led some people to suggest that there might However, quantum theory does not actually explain mind already be room for the sort of phenomena studied by – it just hints that it may have a role to play in physics.

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