‘…Up until now, the philosophy of reductionism, which tells us how things work by breaking them up into parts has served us well. However the present crisis in particle physics can perhaps be expressed by the simple statement that reductionism and the search for grand unification seem no longer to be working.’ Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, 1997

In his opus work, The Life Divine, India’s greatest sage, Sri Aurobindo, wrote that the world had reached a point which he characterized as an ‘evolutionary crisis’. It is a crisis driven by man’s limited mental capacity and understanding and the burden of his past beliefs. And because it is an evolutionary crisis there is the implication of an unrelenting force and compounding pressure behind it seeking some form of resolution by pushing the mental consciousness and species into a more acute state of tension whereby it might exceed itself in a new more inclusive vision of reality. Before this happens however, the Mental world we have created with its bi-polar oppositions, irreconcilable beliefs and intractable positions will be pushed to the brink of destruction. And nowhere will these evolutionary tensions be so great as in our deeply entrenched beliefs about Spirituality and Science because neither of these traditions are open to the concept of evolution, let alone the reality.

Inextricably linked with the Evolution, which is a self-evident fact for most people, is the Involution without which there would be no evolving in time. This is a terrifying notion for our 21st century Science which is wedded to the idea that there is no meaning, purpose, or preexisting plan to what presents to our senses as the Physical universe, but Sri Aurobindo tells us otherwise,

“…From the beginning the whole development [of the universe] is predetermined in its self-knowledge and at every moment in its self-working – it is and moves to what it must be by its own original Truth, and will be at the end that which was contained and intended [Involved] in its seed.”

Sri Aurobindo goes on to explain:

‘…We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a further step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life.’ Sri Aurobindo – The Life Divine —The Human Aspiration, pp. 4-5

According to Sri Aurobindo, what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution. What was original and primal in the involution is, in the evolution, the last and supreme emergence; a mind of Unity and Knowledge that knows all things as itself and in itself and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance. This emergent faculty is the Vedic Truth-Consciousness or what Sri Aurobindo has termed the Supermind. It is characterized by Precision, Clarity and a more integral Vision of the whole which Sees each thing in its proper place. As Thea has written, ‘…It embraces the past but only because it reveals at the same time that which lies far beyond it.’ It is for this reason that the ACC website with its Supramental perspective is utterly unique in its ability to facilitate a discourse that leads beyond Science and Spirituality.

The purpose of this posting to the ACC Forum is to apply this higher perspective to the condition of modern Scientific Cosmology and its dogmatic adherence to a philosophy of fragmentation and reductionism which attempts to tell us how the world works by breaking up the constituents of matter into smaller and smaller pieces. Central to this discussion is the Standard Model of Physics and its implementation at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider which is Science’s $13 billion dollar Temple to the OLD CONSTANT.

The Large Hadron Collider

Just outside Geneva, in an underground facility between France and Switzerland, CERN – the ‘Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire’ built a 17 mile circular tunnel to house the most complex and expensive machine ever built. It is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In a maze of tunnels, some as much as 30 stories underground, the world’s leading physicists have created a machine which they hope will reconstruct the conditions that may have existed at the ‘Planck Scale’, a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. They do this by smashing beams of protons together inside the LHC at close to the speed of light and examining the debris. Their hope is that by analyzing these high speed experiments on ‘fundamental particles’ they will be able to peer deeper into the building blocks of nature. To achieve these incredible speeds the LHC uses some 10,000 super-cooled, superconducting electromagnets and superconducting cables that must be maintained at ultra low temperatures of -271°C.

The LHC went live in September 10th, 2008 and almost immediately, within 9 days, on September 19th it experienced a major accident caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets. In an instant an electrical arc was created that punctured the liquid helium enclosure leading to the release of the gas into the insulation vacuum of the cryostat. When the pressures were released into the tunnel they were unable to contain the rise in force. Pressure valves failed to vent the gas and a shock wave ran through the tunnel. The forces brought to bear on the vacuum barriers attached to the quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 metres long, which focus the beams, were so strong that the cryostats housing these magnets actually broke their anchors in the concrete floor of the tunnel. A 400 meter section of the collider was completely wrecked taking one year and $60 million to repair. In March, 2013, after three and a half years of operations, the LHC was shut down again, this time for two years to give scientists, engineers and technicians the opportunity to upgrade the machine. It is scheduled for a Super Restart on March 25th, 2015 with an increase of the collision energy of over twice the force of previous levels. The collision energy at restart will be 13 Trillion Electron Volts (TeV). Following a revision of their Gravity Model, CERN scientists plan to conduct new experiments at these higher levels in the hope that a completely new universe will be revealed, rewriting not only the physics books but the philosophy books as well.

The Standard Model

Since the 1930s physicists have developed a well tested body of theoretical knowledge about the fundamental structure of matter that has come to be known as the Standard Model of Physics. It describes what matter is made of and how the basic building blocks of matter interact with the four fundamental forces at work in the universe. Scientists have been able to reduce and classify these forces in categories according to the strength of the force that they carry and the subatomic particles with which they interact.

The basic grains of matter are called fermions and the force carriers are known as bosons. Fermions come in two families; leptons and quarks each containing six members. The twelve Fermions are the building blocks of matter. These particles interact with each other through fundamental forces and each force comes with one or more force carriers. There are complex mathematic equations expressing these interrelationships in a way that allows theorists to make very precise predictions. Nearly every quantity that has been measured in particle physics laboratories over the past five decades falls right on the predicted value except one: the now infamous Higgs Boson. It is the missing link in the Standard model that ostensibly explains how other particles get their mass.

The Old Constants are Dangerously Incomplete

While the Standard Model accurately describes the visible phenomena within its domain, it is still incomplete. Research based on gravitational studies which the Standard Model does not include tells us that all of the visible matter around us including ourselves, the stars and planets only amounts to about 4% of the material volume of the universe. The remaining 96% of the universe is composed of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which the Standard Model does not acknowledge and cannot explain. Another, more serious problem, described by physicists is that that the Standard Model lacks robustness at higher levels of energy. In experiments conducted at low energy levels particles behave as expected, but with scientists and technicians at CERN more than doubling the power and collision energy of the LHC to levels of energy that existed only trillionths of a second after the so called Big Bang, all bets are off. This is where the Old Constants and the equations of the Standard Model begin to break down including Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. At these levels of collision energy it is impossible to predict what will happen. It will all depend on the unknown physics at the Planck Scale, which at this point remain unknowable.

All assurances to the contrary, it is becoming increasingly evident, even to the non-scientist, that the Standard Model of Physics no longer works, nor does the belief that empirical observation of the known is the only sure course to discover the mysteries of the universe. With recent discoveries of so-called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ it appears that no less that 96% of the universe is completely unknown to us and more importantly, un-measurable. A reductive empirical observation of the behavior of Matter is simply no longer an option. If scientist can only guess at what is going on based on the 4% of the universe that they can measure, this is clearly insufficient to provide any credible picture of the universe, let alone a grand unified field theory. As a result of their failures, particularly in finding the Higgs Boson, scientists are slowly beginning to understand what the ancient sages had known for millennia; that the physical and measurable reality accounts for only a minute portion of the Whole.

‘The material universe is only the facade of an immense building which has other structures behind it, and it is only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance…I myself see certain fundamental truths underlying all the domains and the one Reality everywhere. But there is also a great difference in the instruments used and the ways of research followed by the seekers in these different ways (the physical, the occult and the spiritual) and for the intellect at least the bridge between them has still to be built. One can point out analogies, but be maintained very well that Science cannot be used for yielding or buttressing results of spiritual knowledge.’ 11 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 212

Courting Disaster

Clearly the truth physicists seek through the Old Constants at CERN cannot be found in sub-atomic particles no matter how long or hard they search. But their naïve willingness to tamper at the threshold of the awesome forces that created the universe exposes us all to incredible danger. The question to consider is this: What kind of careless risks are arrogant scientists willing to take to try and justify this patently untenable position? Since it is moving in a direction counter to what a supramental knowledge would consider prudent, the odds of an unexpected accident grow stronger every day. Grave warnings over the Super Restart at the LHC have been given by a number of scientists including the eminent physicist, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium. And if that doesn’t give us cause for concern, there is the enigmatic passage from the seer Nostradamus that appears tailor-made for the possibility of an accident at CERN.

“Leave, leave, go forth out of Geneva, all Saturn of gold shall be changed into iron, the contrary of the positive ray shall exterminate all, before it happens, the heavens shall show signs.”  Nostradamus – Centuries, Quatrain 9: 44 ^[1]

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, bears a certain similarity to the legendary power source of Atlantis known as the ‘terrible crystal’ or the Tuaoi Stone. It was a huge 6 sided cylindrical crystal which was said to be able to capture solar, lunar, atmospheric and telluric energies and focus them in such a way that produced tremendous power. According to the renowned psychic Edgar Cayce, the crystal amplified the powers of the Sun itself to create a Ray that could generate energy from the disintegration of the atom. As the arrogant priests of the Great Crystal became greedy for more power, said Cayce, the energies of the Firestone were tuned to higher and more destructive frequencies until in their carelessness they finally destroyed their entire civilization. The story of Atlantis has special meaning for our modern world in the sense that we too are vulnerable to an arrogant science that has become disconnected from the true nature of the universe.

The Speed of Gnosis

The only thing that can reverse this dangerous threat is a willing embrace of a sweeping change beyond the old Mental consciousness and species into a new Supramental Gnosis where the truths of the creation may actually be found. Thea explains:

“Einstein was the prime example of Mind in control. Mind dictating the course of evolution – making it in Man/Mind’s image. This is the tragedy. Therefore, he had to forego the cosmological constant that would have been his finest hour. It is all so very clear when one has the New Way as touchstone. We have to view what is happening in our very times as supremely important. Just like the chemists and their Cold Fusion breakthrough, the Italian scientist who measured the speed of the neutrino and declared that perhaps the speed of light could no longer hold as the determining constant of physics, so too is he being denigrated by his co-scientists. HE HAS BEEN FORCED TO RESIGN. ^[2] They claim they will re-test at some future date, but you can be certain that those results will not be matched again – the same story as Cold Fusion. They have put the lid on the issue because it means the end of science as we know it.

The speed of light as constant confined us, imprisoned us in this material universe. With it, based on that constant we could never know Oneness. Astronomers continue to probe EXTERNALLY seeking for the first moment ‘out there’, in the far and farther beyond; and only then will they have the secret to the origin of our universe. Light is MATERIAL. It is not of the essence of consciousness. Only through consciousness can we come to that Zero compaction ‘on the other side’. Only then can we experience Oneness and ’see along with the Supreme’. For this is the goal: to consciously ’see along with the Supreme’. To consciously be its instruments for the delight of Being – and this delight can only come through Becoming, never otherwise. And only Supermind can reach these heights – never Mind. We have exceeded Mind. There is no doubt about it; otherwise I could never have formulated what I did this morning. The FORMULATION is the breakthrough, the moment of integration when the threads come together in the experience of Oneness.

The world stands on the threshold of this great breakthrough – but the old Constant blocks the way. No other scientist will dare seek the truth of the neutrino because they have made an example of the one who did dare: forced to resign. Mon Dieu, our world is sick indeed. Never like now do we need a new Constant.” Thea – Private Correspondence

From the ancient Greek Hubris (ὕβρις) means extreme pride or willful self-confidence. When it offended the gods of ancient Greece, it was usually punished severly. Nemesis appears as the avenger of crime and the punisher of hubris. She was also called “Adrasteia”, meaning “one from whom there is no escape”; her epithet Erinys (the implacable) is specially applied to Demeter, the Mother Goddess. Researchers at CERN should take note of the wisdom of the Greeks and the fact that that they are pursuing a willful and dangerous course that obstructs the progress of the evolution as well as the demands of the Time Spirit. It is not likely to end well.

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[1] In the language of Cosmology, the planet Saturn, because of its function of precision and measure, has long been associated with Science. ‘All Saturn of Gold’ could thus be understood as the wealth or positive effects of science. In alchemy ‘Iron’ is representative of the planet Mars, which is often associated with war and destruction. ‘Shall be changed into Iron’ suggests that the golden age of science will be changed to an age of destruction. (It should not be overlooked that one of CERN’s symbols is Nataraja, the dancing Shiva, Hindu God of Destruction) That Nostradamus even speaks of Geneva and the ‘Ray’ in the same quatrain is truly remarkable in light of CERN and the LHC. The ‘contrary of the positive ray’ can only be understood as a negative ray; radiation, electro-magnetic effects, strangelets, mini black holes or something as yet unknown from other dimensions. ‘The heavens shall show signs’ is an oft repeated phrase that can be found in the Bible and the broader body of world prophesy. It is a nod to the law of correspondences, As Above, So Below’ and the Manifestations that decree the exact timing of great periods of evolutionary change.

[2] In September of 2011, Prof. Dr. Antonio Ereditato – University of Bern, High Energy Physics and director of the Opera project at CERN announced the possibility of Superluminal travel (beyond the speed of light) by Neutrinos which are subatomic particles that appear to have no mass. The experiment timed neutrinos produced at CERN, Europe’s premiere particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, as they arrived 730 kilometres away at OPERA’s underground detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. High-precision atomic clocks stationed at each end of the beam were synchronized using the Global Positioning System (GPS). The team reported in September 2011 that neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso 60 nanoseconds faster than a light beam would do. To fully appreciate the outcry that followed, we must understand that the phenomenon of Fundamentalism is not unique to religion. There is a scientific fundamentalism, dogmatism and rigid adherence to tradition perhaps even worse than religion because of the long standing academic tradition behind it. As Peter Plichta wrote in his marvelous book, God’s Secret Formula, ‘…In this world nothing can, or can be allowed, to be wrong which for hundreds of years has been blessed by scientific approval’. In Dr. Ereditato’s case it was his challenge to Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity which holds that NOTHING can travel faster that the speed of Light. The furor that followed upon Dr. Ereditato’s discoveries might be compared to a scientific inquisition suddenly thrust upon someone found guilty of the greatest heresy. Excuses were made, faulty instruments, miscalculations, and Dr. Ereditato offered himself up with a very dignified resignation as director of the Opera project. As yet, the matter has not been revisited. But to quote Peter Plichta’s book once again in a passage that recalls the words spoken to him by the famous Physicist E.O. Fischer. ‘…One day, perhaps it will take 30 or 40 years – someone will come, someone with an individual mind, and then modern physics will collapse like a house of cards…I am a physicist, I have been awarded the Nobel Prize and I know that modern physics is wrong.’