Consciousness, Metaphysics, Science and the (Shhh) Possible Overlap

"There are certain pillars which have been established as the unshakeable supports of the Faith of God. The mightiest of these is learning and the use of the mind, the expansion of consciousness, and insight into the realities of the universe and the hidden mysteries of Almighty God. To promote knowledge is thus an inescapable duty imposed on every one of the friends of God."

Taken from: Selections from the Writings of`Abdu'l-Bahá (more can be found on this topic here).

It's interesting that in the perceived 'clash' between religion and science, we've heard far more reasoned, eloquent arguments regarding how the former should engage with and be regulated by the latter than truly convincing arguments to the contrary.

In our day and age, it is easy to disparage anything faith-based or esoteric, and yet we are, progressively, hearing about the 'grey' areas at the periphery of scientific investigation, which have brought up paradoxes surprisingly better explained by a more numinous or 'spiritual' or estoric approach than a materialist one.

Forefront in the geography of such grey and enigmatic areas is the realm of physics, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology.

A highly intriguing article along this vein appeared in The New York Times today under the headline: Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? by Dennis Overbye, in which the opening paragraphs run thus:

"It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

"If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

"This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so there in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us."

The rest of the article is a must for those, like myself, intrigued by how our material and esoteric understanding is, as I believe, inexorably heading to overlap.

And isn't it interesting that "the death of space-time" shows up in a mainstream newspaper when the New Age community has been abuzz with expectations of an end to 'linear time' and a multidimensional consciousness as we count down to December 21, 2012?