The Forbidden Universe (45 page)

Although the comparison would no doubt have truly appalled Wheeler and probably wouldn’t find favour with Hawking, such ideas chime very well with the global coherence effect found by Dick Bierman and the Global Consciousness Project. This shares with the participatory universe hypothesis the basic idea that mind is intimately
bound up with matter – indeed, that the mind is even a property of matter. Both show that the very presence of thinking entities affects the physical universe at a quantum level.

This idea of the participatory universe understandably fuels all manner of speculation. Perhaps, as humans observe more and more of the universe, both on a cosmic scale and at a quantum level, the relationship between our
consciousness
and the universe is becoming more and more interdependent. Perhaps, too, as Teilhard de Chardin thought, we, along with extraterrestrial races, are evolving into a cosmic consciousness. This was the plan all along: in the end, we will all
be
the universe. If this is the case then humans are or will be God, the creator of the universe in the first place.

Or maybe there is a hierarchy of observers, with more advanced beings already taking a more active role in shaping the cosmos. Barrow and Tipler describe a possible extrapolation of Wheeler’s vision:

If so, they speculate, the unfolding of the universe is leading up to the Ultimate Observer’s Final Observation, when the cosmic plan will be complete.

Others still seek to keep a more-or-less traditional God in the picture. Keith Ward, British theologian, philosopher and born-again Anglican minister, takes Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle to a new, if predictable, extreme. Ward suggests that it is not humans and extraterrestrials doing
the observing and creating: ‘God is the ultimate observer or consciousness which creates the reality.’
⁴⁸
However, he does accept that human consciousness makes a small
contribution
to the shaping of the universe. But even that small contribution represents a huge leap for a born-again Christian priest.

Despite being speculative, all three extrapolations agree that intelligent, conscious beings – such as humans – are in some way partly the creator.

As we have seen throughout this book, understanding God was one of the central inspirations for science. Isaac Newton, for example:

Echoing this, the man who is in many ways Newton’s modern equivalent, Stephen Hawking, writes in the memorable phrase that concludes
A Brief History of Time
(1988) that the ultimate goal of science is to ‘know the mind of God’.
⁵⁰

In fact, the quest for the mind of God may effectively be over. In the end, the journey was not a long one and the destination has proved much closer to home than anyone could have imagined. We all have a share in God’s mind simply by being human.

The Hermetic quest also sought primarily to understand the mind of God through knowledge of the cosmos, as can be seen from Treatise XI of the
Corpus Hermeticum
, in which Mind explains to Hermes:

The Hermetic cosmos itself is also described as a thought of God’s, the product of his mind – in a sense, his mind itself.

Even if John Wheeler and other celebrated scientists such as Stephen Hawking are not aware of it, the universe they describe has such close parallels with the Hermetic vision – the solar child of the ancient Egyptian religion of Heliopolis – that they might as well be the two encircling strands around the same caduceus of wisdom.

In Wheeler’s participatory universe, the consciousness of observers is embedded in its structure and both mind and universe are therefore shaped by and shape each other. We are, or at least are part of, the creative force. If for creative force we read God – and the distinction is only a matter of semantics or personal taste – then essentially all humanity is divine or at least an integral part of the divine.

The creative force and the material universe are locked in an eternal embrace or endless creative waltz. Shifting the terminology again, God is the universe, and vice versa. Intelligent beings are part of God, and also, as their minds help shape the universe, they enjoy a special role in creation. Creator, created and creation are constantly circling in a dazzling dance of ultimate meaning and purpose, an endless jump of joy.

Yet as encapsulated in the Hermetica, this apparent welter of transcendentalism has not been the Holy Grail of
many of the world’s most brilliant minds simply because they liked the mysticism and poetry – although that certainly has its own appeal. To the Hermeticist, pursuing any intellectual endeavour without including the idea of God would be simply absurd. Very succinctly Treatise XI describes the all-pervasive divine: ‘God makes eternity; eternity makes the cosmos; the cosmos makes time; time makes becoming.’
⁵²

Glenn Alexander Magee writes of the ‘Hermetic doctrine of the “circular” relationship between God and creation and the necessity of man for the completion of God’.
⁵³
According to the Hermetica then, humankind has a special place in God’s creation. God needs human beings to exist because we are part of God. And we also need God, we need worship, we need awe. The concept of ordinary, everyday humanity in some very real way actually completing God is anathema to, for example, Catholicism, with its fixation on sin, purgatory and subservience to priests and a deity whose separate being is always above and beyond us.

Wheeler says essentially the same thing as the Hermetica: the circular relationship between mind and the universe makes human consciousness necessary for the completion of the universe. The same idea is found in Neoplatonism, which is hardly surprising given the Egyptian roots it shares with Hermeticism, through its founder Plotinus, student of the mysterious Egyptian sage Ammonius Saccas. As Magee notes: ‘Like the Hermeticists, Plotinus holds that the cosmos is a circular process of emanation and return to the One’.
⁵⁴

From the same basic reasoning as our own – which is based on the growing evidence of design and purpose being uncovered by all the sciences – Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued in the 1970s that the universe was ‘
self-organizing
’: ‘God is not the creator, but the mind of the
universe.’
⁵⁵
Although Jantsch found this concept behind many of the great mystical religions, one lay behind them all. He explains that, ‘In the oldest recorded world view, Hermetic philosophy … this wholeness resting in itself is called the “all”.’
⁵⁶
Jantsch seems to here recognize the origins of Hermeticism in the religion of Heliopolis, whose Pyramid Texts are indeed the world’s oldest cosmological writings.

The same matrix of connections exists between the picture emerging from quantum physics and Heliopolitan thought. In Wheeler’s system, the laws of physics build the material universe, which eventually gives rise to living organisms, which eventually produce sentient beings able to observe and understand the cosmos. By discovering how the universe works, observers are actually creating it in the far distant past – even at the beginning of time. Wheeler saw this as a cycle or feedback loop whereby the universe creates sentient beings who then return the loop back to the beginning. He encapsulated this cycle in his famous diagram showing the eye of the observer looking back at the beginning of the universe (see illustrations) and in the words:

Exciting though this may be, what Wheeler describes is by no means a new concept. It resoundingly echoes key ideas of the Pyramid Texts, which speak of how Atum created the big bang – very literally – giving rise to the expanding and ever-more complex universe that ultimately created people, who live on the edge of manifestation, in what Karl Luckert
calls the ‘turn-around realm’, the inner place where human consciousness begins its return journey to Atum. And it is not just to him that human consciousness returns, but to his very act of creation – in other words, back to the big bang.

In a deeply satisfying exchange, not only does the latest scientific thinking support the Hermetic cosmology but Hermeticism in turn makes sense of the discoveries of science … This is as it should be, for it was a brutal operation that severed the two. And now they seem to be calling to each other like separated twins, aching to be as one again.