The Physics of Angels. Rupert Sheldrake

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СКАЧАТЬ many implications for worship. We need to set our prayer circles in the context of this vast, alive, complex, and amazing universe, for example. Today we have the electronics to do this. To take worship out of the hands of little books and put it into a cosmology again. Then the angels will be present at worship once again.

      The angel that has something to do with the incredible intelligence of the sun ought to be there. In our worship, we ought to be awakening the sense of awe—and awe includes terror—with reality. The universe is our home, and everything we’re talking about is our home. This is the temple of God, it’s God’s home.

      Angels are so often depicted as light-beings reflecting the luminosity of the divine one. I know you were struck in reading Thomas Aquinas’s statement that angels move from one place to another with no time lapse. You said it reminded you of Einstein’s thinking about light. What about the idea of angels as photons, light-bearers?

      Rupert: When Aquinas discusses how angels move from place to place, his reasoning has extraordinary parallels to both quantum and relativity theories. Angels are quantized; you get a whole angel or none at all; they move as units of action. The only way you can detect their presence is through action; they are quanta of action. And although when they act in one place and then in another, from our point of view time elapses while they are moving, from the point of view of the angel this movement is instantaneous; no time elapses. This is just like Einstein’s description of the movement of a photon of light. Although we as external observers can measure the speed of light, from the point of view of the light itself, no time elapses as it is traveling. It doesn’t get older. We still have light around from 14 billion years ago, from soon after the Big Bang, in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation. After all that time, it’s still around and still going strong.

      So in modern physics there are remarkable parallels to the traditional doctrines about angels, and I think the parallels arise because the same problems are being considered. How does something without mass, without body, but capable of action, move? Angels, according to Aquinas, have no mass, they have no body. And the same goes for photons: they are massless, and you can detect them only by their action.

      Matthew: Does that mean that photons are immortal?

      Rupert: Yes, as long as they are moving at the speed of light from place to place. But when they act, they are extinguished through their action, so in that sense they come to an end; they pass on their energy as they act. This, I presume, makes them different from angels.

      Although there are parallels between modern physics and medieval ideas about angels, the aspect of modern science that raises the most interesting questions is the theory of evolution. In the Middle Ages, nature was regarded as fixed: the cosmos, the earth, and the forms of life upon it were not seen as evolving. In biology, the idea of evolution was first proposed in a scientific form in 1858 by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. In physics, the notion of cosmic evolution became orthodox in the late 1960s as a consequence of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Now we see everything as evolutionary in nature. This means that there is a continuing creativity in all realms of nature. Is this all a matter of blind chance, as materialists believe? Or are there guiding intelligences at work in the evolutionary process?

      As far as I know, one of the first people to explore this possibility was Alfred Russel Wallace. After he and Darwin together published the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin went on to develop a gloomy materialism, which now pervades the thinking of neo-Darwinism, the orthodox doctrine of academic biology. All of evolution must have happened by chance and through unconscious laws of nature, and it has no meaning or purpose.

      By contrast, Wallace came to the conclusion that evolution involved more than natural selection and was guided by creative intelligences, which he identified with angels. His conception is summarized in the title of his last book, The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose⁶ We hear a great deal about Darwin today, but we don’t hear much about Wallace. I am fascinated that these very different conceptions of evolution were expressed by the two founders of evolutionary theory; they show that evolution can be interpreted in quite different ways. If you are a materialist, evolutionary creativity can only be a matter of blind chance. But if you believe there are other forces or intelligences in the universe, then there are other possible sources of creativity, whether you call them angels or not.

      This raises a problem that Aquinas and other medieval thinkers did not and could not deal with, namely, the role of angels in evolution. For example, as new galaxies appear, presumably the appropriate angels that govern the galaxy must come into being with the galaxy, unless all the angels are there, waiting at the moment of the Big Bang for their moment to come.

      Matthew: And maybe angels are recycled, like those that hovered over the dinosaurs; they would otherwise have been out of a job for sixty million years.

      Rupert: These are questions that were inconceivable in the Middle Ages. Our evolutionary cosmology does not have less room for angels, but vastly more.

      Matthew: Yes. I feel very strongly that as a living cosmology comes back, the angels are returning, because they are part of any sound cosmology. Maybe the angels themselves will bring into our culture some of the imagination that we’re calling for.

      In my book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ⁷ I coined the term “deep ecumenism.” For me, deep ecumenism is going beyond the level of world religions relating to one another in terms of doctrine and theological study papers, and entering more into their mystical traditions and doing prayer and ritual together.

      All religious traditions that we know of have something to say about angels, spirits other than human beings. Buck Ghosthorse, a Lakota spiritual teacher, once said to me, “What you Christians call angels, we Indians call spirits.” This is common ground on which all our religious traditions can come together today, in deep ecumenism. Angels are not labeled Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic; they are beyond denominationalism.

      Clearly, angels will be part of the movement of deep ecumenism. We are living in a moment in history when we as a species have to ask, what do we have in common? The boundaries are melting between cultures and religions. This makes it important to have a serious discussion of our tradition of angels in the West, not out of jingoism but out of knowing our own tradition well enough so that when we encounter angels and spirits from other traditions, we are not put off or threatened by them. Instead, we can look for the common links, the common truths among the traditions.

      The shamanistic traditions of the world are particularly important in our search for wisdom today. Indigenous peoples lived and survived for thousands of years amid such travails as wild beasts and inclement weather and ice ages; they had to discover ways of creating community, healing, educating, and learning. There is a tremendous lore here that has almost been lost, but not entirely, and it has everything to do with spirits and with angels. When praying with Native American peoples, I have experienced remnants of it that fill a gap in my own religious experience. Our Celtic ancestors too had a well-developed theology of angels and spirit guardians.

      Rupert: Yes. The awareness of nonhuman spirits is fundamental to the religious experience of practically every tradition, maybe from the time we became human. This may be the primordial ground of religious experience. The awareness of spirits comes before the idea of a single God. It’s significant that in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, as in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, there is the continuing presence of a multiplicity of spirits. Even in the most monotheistic of faiths, namely Islam, we find no denial of angels. This ancient strand of religious experience is not negated, but rather amplified by the later evolution of religions.

      Matthew: Yet we have one moment in human history when these spirits were excommunicated, and that is the last few hundred years, the modern era. СКАЧАТЬ