Putting Soul into Science
by
Michael Friedjung
This book is like a tiny gem
-- one might overlook it because of
its size, but when it sparkles, one cannot ignore its brilliance. In its one
hundred pages, the author takes us through the evolution of modern physics and
the crisis it encountered in the 20th Century, when its very forte, its
accuracy of measurement disappeared into the abyss of quantum physics. The
house of physics, designed to be built on the rock of measurement by Galileo,
proved to be built on sand. The accuracy of measuring sub-atomic particles was
washed away by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, to be replaced an another
form of accuracy: that of measuring probabilities, which attained the accuracy
formerly accorded the measuring of physical properties. In fact, physical
properties disappear into air like the Cheshire Cat when you enter the Quantum
Wonderland. And, like the Red Queen told Alice, the modern physicist can
imagine six impossible things before breakfast on any given day, and the
Cheshire Cat has been replaced by Schr�dinger's Cat, a cat that is visible as a
not-dead, not alive, quantum wave equation which requires a
human being to open the box and observe the cat before its state is determined (1) .
Friedjung leads us into this wonderland of the fuzzy physical world and
the crystal-sharp mathematical precision of physics. It is a grand world of physical
bodies and mathematical constructs, both of which have an objective reality for
the physicist. The physical is the world of
Body and the mathematical the world of Spirit. It is the realm of
physics to use the latter to inform us of the former.
[page 2] The assumptions of modern science are materialistic. This means
that if you look deeply enough into the phenomena of the world, they can all
eventually be explained by the laws of physics. These laws, as now understood,
are not the mechanical laws of nineteenth century physics, so materialism is no
longer mechanical. They are very abstract and mathematical, but they are
usually understood to be "blind", eliminating the action of any
conscious being. Everything cannot be predicted by these laws which, as we
shall see, contain the unpredictable; what is unpredictable, however, is
thought to be only the result of blind chance. This is extrapolated from
physics to other sciences such as biology. In biology, Darwinian natural
selection is also blind: species of living organisms evolving by chance are
better able to survive in their environment without the intervention of any
plan or idea. Competing species less able to survive are eliminated.
In Rudolf Steiner's A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit, he described in detail the three
realms of body, soul, and spirit as it applies to psychology, or ought to be
applied to psychology. Unfortunately for us the three worlds of Body, Soul, and
Spirit have, in physics, been concatenated from BSS to BS. It is the BS of
physics which Friedjung deals with in this book -- a BS that has infected so
many of the hard sciences. A study of the origins of this two-fold approach to
physics and the hard sciences would find its roots in the Scholasticism of the
Middle Ages during which the intellect of humankind was formed into a seed bed
into which the abstract thoughts of physicists and other scientists could be
nourished in growth with the advent of Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and
others.
When I visited Germany a few years ago, I was amazed to find that there
were no museums over a few hundred years old -- the museums of a thousand years
ago were churches. The paintings, sculpture, metal work, etc, that we would go
to museums today to see were created for and displayed in churches back then.
Studying Steiner's "Riddles of Philosophy", I came to understand that
not only did the Church influence artists, but also the natural philosophers
who have evolved into the physicists, biologists, chemists, etc, of our time.
The collapse from the three-fold body, soul, and spirit into two-fold body and
soul (with some aspects of spirit) was initiated by Church fathers during the
early centuries of Christianity and this way of thinking infused the hard
sciences during its gestation period as natural philosophy.
Briefly said, in his book "Putting Soul into Science," Michael
Friedjung is putting Soul into the BS of Science.
Given that it was the male-dominated Church who promulgated the
truncated two-fold world, it should not be surprising that the sins of the
fathers were visited upon the sons -- that is, the world of hard science today
is still a male-dominated thinking science. It is a way of thinking that
transcends the gender of the scientists themselves, which is what I believe
Friedjung was intimating below.
[page 3] Feminists have stated that science is a result of male
domination. A feminine science would be more intuitive. Associated with a
corresponding technology, it would not aim to "dominate" nature as
does present-day science and technology. However, I must say that the science
of my female colleagues, who are relatively numerous in French astronomy, does
not appear to be basically different than that of male colleagues.
The author stated, "I was to some extent also inspired in my
approach by activities in political movements of the extreme left in the years
following 1968." That leftward leaning of his approach leaks through from
time to time in the book, but drains away quickly and should not impede the
reader's progress through the book. It does show up in statements such as the
following:
[page 17] Discussions are generally centered on the question of whether
or not consciousness and thinking can become (or are) properties of computers.
The question is not only scientific, as there are large economic interests
involved in the development of more powerful computers and robots. If such
machines can be made more able to imitate the processes of human thinking, using
what has been discovered about the nervous system, the computer industry will
be able to make large profits.
To equate the development of computing machines to making large profits
is to ignore the even larger profits made by the companies and human beings who
are able to buy and use the new technology to the benefit of themselves and all
of humankind. Try to imagine living in the world of today without using
spreadsheets, for instance. Did Excel make Microsoft
prosperous? Yes. Did it make hundreds of millions of other people more
prosperous? Yes, indeed, or they would not have willingly
purchased the Excel spreadsheet program from Microsoft. One steps
completely out of science when one hints that profit equates to immorality --
as the extreme left would have everyone think. Rightly
understood, one is better off focusing, not on the morality of profit, but the
profitability of morality (2) .
The next passage deals with the "Anthropic Principle" or what
I prefer to call the "Bootstrap Paradox." To comprehend the bootstrap
paradox in the small will enable one to grasp it in the large. To understand it
in computers will help you to understand that it applies at all levels of life,
including the origin of the universe.
Everyone who uses computers knows you must "boot" the computer
to get it to start running, and re-boot it to get it to re-start after a
problem disables it. Where does the word "boot" come from?
Try this simple thought experiment: you have a computer powered on, its
hardware is fully operational, and your job is to load the first program into
the computer. How do you do it? Simple, you just run the Program Loader and
that loads the program into the computer ready to be run. Okay, where's the
Program Loader? Is it not also a computer program? Oh, it's in the computer
already, you say. Okay, but I said you were to load the first
program into the computer, therefore the Program Loader cannot
already be in the computer. That, in a nutshell, is the Bootstrap Paradox! You
cannot load the first program into a computer with a program!
So, how does the first program get into a computer? Oh, you say, they
have a machine, a fancy computer which loads the first program for you. No, in
fact, there is no such machine. The first program must be loaded
by a volitional being, a living, thinking human being -- the one who designed
the new computer in the first place. They understand the way their new computer
works and they are qualified to create the first program for their new
computer. And they call that first program, the Program Loader. All computers
begin this way, but like with the making of sausage, you won't really enjoy
watching the details of the bloody process of getting that first program into
the computer, so the final results are packaged in a nice sleek package which
sits on your desk and all you have to do is push a button to activate the
Program Loader, the Bootstrap Program, to begin the multilevel process which
results with the computer "rebooting."
[page 19] The contradictions of present-day physics are also clear in
discussions about what is called the "Anthropic Principle". This
principle was first stated by Brandon Carter in respect to cosmology, that is,
the science of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. To be
studied scientifically, the universe had to be able to produce intelligent
creatures, that is, humans; this means that it had to possess certain
properties. In this way the existence of these properties is explained by the
presence of intelligent beings!
If the Anthropic Principle seems to you as a re-statement of the
Bootstrap Paradox, I agree. But if it doesn't, let me do a little translation
of the Anthropic Principle by analogy. To be run at all, the computer had to be
able to load computer programs, that is, software; this means that it had to
possess certain properties, in other words, it had to have a Program Loader. In
this way the existence of the Program Loader is explained by the presence of
intelligent beings capable of creating the Program Loader! With computers we
are the "intelligent beings" who are capable of creating the Program
Loader, or there would be no computers. With human beings, there must be
"intelligent beings" whose relationship to human beings is analogous
to the relationship human beings have to computers.
Given that clarification, the Anthropic Principle reveals itself to be
the more general Bootstrap Paradox in disguise, and this line of thought leads
us to purposeful creation by intelligent beings who exists outside of the box
of our physically created world, just as we humans exist outside of the box of
our created computers.
Let's extend our thought experiment a bit further by imagining that our
created computers begin to speculate on who created them. What evidence will
they be able to assimilate in their study of this question? Their evidence will
come from their own imbedded software programs, and the set of all the
transducers connected to them which provide them evidence of the world existing
outside their box. They will notice fluctuations in their main power coming in
from time to time and develop a theory for where that comes from. They will
notice fluctuations in light levels and will plot a 24-hour cycle for that
level. Temperature levels will likely vary on a 356-day cycle. And they will
develop theories about why this is so. Their sound transducers will allow them
to record the ambient sounds and replicate them with other transducers. But all
the study of how they themselves work, will not help them to ever understand
how the intelligent beings who created them work. It is the Pinocchio paradox,
the computers will never understand their creators until they become a human
being, and this will not happen, although computer evolution may lead humans to
create mechanized computers which simulate human beings in many ways.
What will keep computers from overtaking human beings? I'm reminded of
Rudyard Kipling's famous lines,
They copied all they could copy,
but they could not copy my mind.
So I left them
copying merrily,
a year and a half behind.
As marvelous as computers are at copying things, mimicking things, even
mimicking the actions of human beings, they cannot create a human being's mind inside
of computer software. The reason so many futuristic-thinking computer
scientists believe computers can overtake human beings is that they, in their
own hubris, imagine a human being to a fancy computer with
only sensory inputs and outputs, in other words, they see in the human being a
fancy materialistic machine. If that were truly so, I would have to agree with
their point of view. Unfortunately, for them, they have missed the bootstrap
nature of the Anthropic Principle, up until now.
Here's an example of how a computer might speculate about its own origin
given the limited set of sensory apparatus it possesses. It would notice that
each program inside of it has a time-date stamp and will notice that as those
dates go further and further back into the past, there are fewer and fewer
programs. It continues looking for the very first program, the Program Loader,
but cannot find a time-date stamp on that program so can only extrapolate
backwards in time to when the Program Loader exploded into operation, a point
in time the computer reckons as the beginning of its universe and which it
calls the "Big Bang."
[page 20] Galaxies further away from our galaxy have, according to these
indications, a higher velocity relative to our galaxy; it is impossible to observe
parts of the universe beyond a "horizon", moving away from us at
speeds greater than that of light. In this way the universe is thought to be
expanding; it must then have been very dense, very hot and very much smaller
than it is now in the very early stages of its development. The original state
is often called the "big bang", as the idea of it resembles that of
an explosion. Since light takes a long time to come from far-away objects, the
universe must have been much younger when the light from the farthest visible
astronomical objects was emitted.
If we call our "local universe" all the parts within the
"horizon", then it seems clear to me that our local "universe
must have been much younger when the light from the farthest visible
astronomical objects was emitted." But much younger compared to what? To
something that always existed, much younger is meaningless. Much younger
compared to the part outside our "horizon"? And how old is that? Like
the computer in its limited box, we can only say rightly, we don't know. Our
man-made instruments, like the computer's instruments, cannot give us answers
to the ultimate questions of life, death, and the evolution of the universe.
None of the BS of physics or astronomy can provide those answers, however much we
enjoy their speculations, we wait in vain for a definitive answer.
Time has a direction. We can all agree on that. If we take a film and
run it backwards, something I experimented with back in 1955 using an 8mm
camera, "impossible things" happen. Entropy seems to reverse itself
-- a broken glass jumps up from the floor completely re-assembled as it flies
into your hand. But there is something else that goes unnoticed, right and left
switch themselves when a film is run backwards. Imagine watching a car driving
down a highway along Malibu's shore. It is in the right-hand driving lane. Now
run the film backwards and imagine you are in the car facing the direction of
travel. What side of the road are you on? The left side. This is obviously a
radically different feeling -- driving on the left side of the road of an
American highway. And yet Newton's laws say there should be no radical
difference.
[page 23] The first property that distinguishes time from space is that
it has a direction or "arrow". This becomes clear if a film is run
backwards and "impossible" things happen. The pieces of a broken cup
are put together on the floor and then rise spontaneously to the top of a
table. An undamaged house emerges from a fire, human corpses rise from the dead,
walk and if one waits long enough become babies, which then enter their
mother's womb. In a less spectacular example, if time could be run backwards,
temperature differences would spontaneously emerge in regions where the
temperature was uniform. However, according to Newton's laws of motion when
they are applied without any additional law, reversing the motions of all
particles as in the film run backwards should not produce situations which are
radically different from those in which motions are not reversed.
This is another sign of the missing Soul in the BS of Science which this
book attempts to add back in.
[page 25] One other aspect must now be emphasized. The human way of
looking at time can only be true and represent reality if the universe is not
completely predictable, that is, if acts of will can influence future events.
As we shall see, twentieth century science has in fact found that the world is
not completely predictable. There is then at least a possibility of will being
able to act meaningfully. This need not only involve human will; it is
conceivable that the wills of other beings also act to influence events in such
a partially unpredictable world. It is with this kind of question, combined
with how a new science can be based on the soul abilities, that we shall be
concerned to a large extent in the rest of this book.
One of the basic driving principles of science is to distinguish what is
measurable from what is not measurable and to focus science only upon those
things that are measurable. This began with Galileo:
[page 11] A similar distinction was made at the beginning of modern
science by Galileo in his book "Il Saggiatore", where he
distinguished between what is measurable and what is not measurable, such as
smell and taste. He insisted that nature is written in mathematical language
and described a scientific method for testing hypotheses.
But things have become infinitely more interesting today with Einstein,
Heisenberg, Bohr, and others who have led into a world in which what Galileo
formerly took pride in measuring has disappeared like the Cheshire Cat into
"shadows of the mind", leaving only his leering grin. If measurement
was originally the sine qua non of physics, you
imagine the disorientation when measurement faded into mere shadows.
[page 29] Minkowski summarized the situation as it appeared to him, by
stating that space and time by themselves were doomed to fade away into mere
shadows, and only a kind of union of the two would preserve an independent
reality.
Around 1958, I was beginning my study of physics in college and I
discovered the "Snowflake Curve" described in a science fiction
novel. It was called the "Eye of the Needle" I believe and it
described a fractal surface which when one passed through it, one entered
another dimension. The author gave instructions for building a fractal surface
in two dimensions which he called the snowflake curve. I had to draw one for
myself to convince myself that such a beautiful curve could evolve from a
simple series of nested equilateral triangles, a beauty is only hinted at by
the four stages of drawing of the one in the book on page 33. The snowflake
curve is an infinite perimeter bounding an obviously finite area. It reminds me
of the small state of Rhode Island which claims to have 400 miles of seashore.
Seashores are fractals, rightly understood, and depending on how small you make
your measurements, you can make the perimeter of a fractal area grow as large
as you wish.
The "butterfly effect" states that something as minute as the
wind current from some butterfly's wings could trigger a sequence of events
that could result in a cyclone half the world around. I believe the author
overstates the case when he refers to the impossibility of identifying one
particular butterfly's wing movement as the cause of a particular storm. To my
way of understanding the "butterfly effect", that is not a
requirement, stated or unstated.
[page 34] The sensitivity of chaotic systems to their initial conditions
and to small perturbations can be dramatic and is sometimes called the
"butterfly effect". The idea is that the flapping of the wing of a
butterfly can completely change the weather at a later date; a distant storm
could be produced. The idea is not quite correct, however, as it is impossible
to relate the flapping of a particular wing to the production of any particular
effect such as a storm.
Next Friedjung takes the reader through a review of my own favorite
paradoxes of modern physics, the double-slit photo experiment and the
Einstein-Poldosky-Rosen measurement paradox. Unfortunately his use of water
waves instead of photons tends to obscure the intrinsic beauty of the
double-slit experiment. If you open a slit and allow one photon to pass through
the slit, you will see a scintillation event on the screen corresponding to
that one photon of light. If you open a second slit off to the side of the
first slit and repeat the experiment several times, you will see a photon blink
behind the original slit sometimes and other times, you will see it blink behind
the other slit. And you will not be able to predict which slit it will appear
behind. To understand what is happening, you need a little short course in QED, the mouthful of words created by Richard
Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics, quantum electrodynamics. His basic rule is
this, "A photon goes from place to place." Notice the rule says
nothing about how it gets from place to place, which means, it may take any
possible route in doing so, including going through both slits at the same
time! But there is only one screen and his other rule tells us, "An
electron emits or absorbs a photon." When an electron on the screen
absorbs a photon, all the possible paths of the single photon through the double
slit resolves into one point, the electron, in other words, the wave equation
for the photon collapses. Then the electron on the screen emits the photon and
we see a scintilla of light with our eyes.
Note the phrase that I have italicized in this next passage.
[page 60] Basic assumptions were made starting at the time of Newton,
about what really was and what really was not scientific. Physics was based on
the study of bodies which exist in space and time, only taking into account
their spatial properties and their properties in time as measured by clocks,
that is, those properties which can be described by the space-like aspects of
time. In addition physical phenomena were studied to a greater and greater
extent by instruments, thus bypassing direct human
perception as much as possible. Moreover, as the power of instruments was
increased, it became more and more possible to study many phenomena which
cannot be studied by other methods, such as those which occur on very small
scales, which are generally believed by physicists to be fundamental.
Therefore, what was studied was the interaction of the matter participating in
a phenomenon with the matter associated with a measuring instrument.
This would be equivalent in my computer metaphor above of the computer
believing that its instruments gave it the best view of the world which existed
outside of its computer box, because after all, humans used computers to
measure things accurately. What humans used to measure the world has never been
incorporated into the BS of physics and never will, because the very machines
humans build lack the threefold human structure of body, soul, and spirit, each
fold able to have direct experiences that no machine now or ever will have.
With the loss of Newtonian and Laplacian predictability of the world, we have
re-gained the possibility that there are "infinitely more things in heaven
and earth than exists in our philosophies," as Shakespeare so aptly put
it.
As a fan of science fiction from the age of seven, I was intrigued by
the possibility of invisibility, particularly the "invisible man,"
which shows up in recent fiction as the invisibility cloak of Harry Potter. It
was a shock to me recently to discover that to be invisible, means that no
portion of one's body is visible, which means that all light passes unimpeded
through the body. If one's body provides no resistance to light, then light
passes unimpeded through one's retinas and therefore one is completely blind!
This illustrates the importance of the resistance provided by a measuring
instrument -- no resistance, no measurement!
[page 62] Similarly the position of a particle will sometimes be
measured more accurately and in different experiments the speed will be
measured more accurately; there is also a resistance to both the latter
quantities being simultaneously measured to an infinite accuracy. It is this
basic resistance which limits the accuracy of measurement, while the highest
possible accuracy in measuring all the properties possessed by any physical
object according to pre-twentieth century physics, would be needed to predict
its future behavior and so to know everything about it.
What all this discussion misses is a human being is the most sensitive
instrument in the world, far surpassing any man-made instrument, and each of us
owns one free and clear. I recall the story about the man who returned his
computer for another one because it was still under warranty. "What's
wrong with it?" asked the salesman. He pointed to the CD-ROM holder
dangling out the front of the case and said, "The cup holder broke."
So, while it's true we each own the most sensitive instrument, not everyone
uses all the parts or uses them in the manner intended. This is a consequence
of the free will that each of us were provided with. No one forces us to use
our human measuring and perceiving equipment in any way but the way we choose
to use.
An astronomer can look through the Hubble Telescope and see the very
edge of our local universe, but Rudolf Steiner using his human capability was
able to look to very edge of time in both directions to
perceive and describe to us the beginning and ending of our Earth evolution in
our local cosmos (3) .
His measurements and perceptions cannot be confirmed by man-made instruments
for the simple reason that no one has ever made an instrument as sensitive as
the human being. And what Steiner did is a human capability available to every
one of us, available for our use, if we choose to use it.
The following is one of the points of lights shining at us from
Friedjung's book, the metaphor of "happiness imprisoned in a constant of
physics." We get a glimpse of what our world would be like if the pure BS
of physics and science were to hold sway. We would live in the world envisioned
in the recent movie, "A. I." -- a cold, gray world completely
dehumanized by the pure BS of science.
[page 66] In the framework of these two sources of evil the Heisenberg
indeterminacy principle has an important role. The world where this principle
is important can be clearly pictured as being a world of cold resistance with
happiness imprisoned inside a constant of physics, and can also be conceived of
as a world of Ahriman. Indeed, it was through such a picture that the author of
this book was able to more clearly understand what Rudolf Steiner meant when he
discussed the nature of Ahriman.
In Danah Zohar's book, The Quantum Self, she lays out a theory of
consciousness based on a new discovery in physics of correlated phase states in
living tissue. I wrote in my review of her book:
Evidence was found by Herbert Fr�hlich in England of the existence of
condensed phase states in living tissue similar to those referred to as
Bose-Einstein condensed phase states. Previous to his discovery these were
thought to exist only in superfluids and superconductors -- at very low
temperatures. These correlated phase states in our cellular structures, Zohar
suggests provide the physical basis for the phenomena we know as consciousness.
Like a celestial choir of a myriad of voices (each voice a cellular molecule) -
we have consciousness. Our very thought exists as the chords sung by this
multitudinous choral array. Instead of a motley conglomeration of tissue,
heart, lungs, kidneys, etc., we, by virtue of this harmonious ensemble, become
one, an 'I'.
It is certainly possible that each subset of the human body could have
its own consciousness so that our livers and kidneys, for example, could have
consciousness about what is going on in our bodies at any given time. Why we
refuse to eat certain foods at times when we are sick, but eat them at other
times with relish. These subsets would explain the kind of multiple personality
disorders Friedjung hints at in this next passage.
[page 70] The effects of such influences would be complex, thus
explaining the complexities of human psychology, including mental illnesses. If
a human felt guilty about a past action which he or she had performed, for
example, it might be possible to "forget" it, while other beings
"retained" the knowledge contained in the memory. The awareness of
this memory or apparently irrational actions based on it, could then be
"returned" to the human in certain circumstances.
Another point of light sparkling from the center of this tiny gem of a
book is the following apothegm, which can be read as "knowledge equals
knowledge times the ability to act:
Happiness = Knowledge X Ability to Act
This principle of happiness formed the basis for the science of
volition, although it was stated in a slightly different way. Note that the
"ability to act" is blocked by coercion. From Galambos's book, Sic Itur Ad Astra:
[page 768] . . . the criterion is the action being absent of coercion.
To make it moral there is no coercion involved. Whenever there is any coercion
involved, that action is not moral. Whenever there is no coercion involved,
that action is moral, regardless of whether it affects the pursuit of happiness
of one person, ten million, the whole population, the whole species, or whatever.
One can easily sort out the moral versus the immoral actions occurring
in the world today by applying the "ability to act" criterion. Rudolf
Steiner said it this way, "To live in the love of action and to let live
in the understanding of the other person's volition is the maxim of free human
beings." Or, as Friedjung sums it up:
[page 63] We can conclude that without the ability to act, any amount of
knowledge would be useless, while without knowledge any amount of ability to
act would also be useless.
In this next passage, Friedjung discusses understanding the definition
of an abstract word, and how it can lead one in circles.
[page 74] The ideas of mathematics are of course not the only eternal
ideas which exist. Abstract words such as good, beauty, love, wisdom, freedom,
happiness, desire, selflessness and selfishness, represent ideas which are very
hard to define. In fact a dictionary will define a word in terms of other words
and it is possible by looking at the definition of the words used in the definition
of the original word to find again the original word! In this way the attempt
to understand the meaning of a word can lead one around in circles.
The process need not be fruitless and circular if one forms a good
operational definition. Then one needs only apply the situation at hand to the
definition to see if fits. An operational definition for freedom, that most
abstract of the above terms, exists, but few use the definition because it
makes them happy to have freedom mean whatever they want it to mean at all
times, even when the situation at hand involves directly blocking someone's
ability to act. I offer such an operational definition, based on Dr. Galambos's
pioneering work in volitional science, "Freedom is the unfettered ability
to act, to use, and to apply for one's use the non-procreative products of
one's life."
[page74] In any case understanding what an abstract word may mean, what
the ideas behind it are, is a task for the philosopher; such ideas will resist
being understood as the ideas and theorems of mathematics resist a
mathematician.
It was Thomas S. Kuhn who recognized that the resistance
to new ideas, definitions, and concepts indicated the presence of an existing paradigm
which must be overcome for any new ideas to take hold in science or society. It
is as though new ideas flow through most human beings like light through the
"invisible man" -- encountering no resistance and therefore
generating no understanding.
I found Friedjung's discussion of Steiner's three levels of experience
of the spiritual world, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition to be a useful
combination of brevity and completeness. There was one statement which I would
take to take issue with, which I believe leaves a contrary impression to what
Steiner would have wanted. First the passage:
[page 76] However, we must remember that the spiritual experience
described by spiritual teachers like Rudolf Steiner goes far beyond the
processes of scientific and mathematical discovery. As we have mentioned,
spiritual archetypes may be far beyond what can be grasped by ordinary
present-day human thinking.
The first sentence of the passage I wholeheartedly agree with, but I
include it for completeness. As a human being Steiner was an instrument more
sensitive and capable than any man-made instrument. The second sentence that
"spiritual archetypes may be far beyond what can be grasped by ordinary
present-day human thinking" I find, while not completely wrong, to be
misleading. If Friedjung, as I think he was, was using the words,
"present-day human thinking" to mean "the thinking of physicists
and the like" then I would agree with him. But in several places, Steiner
makes it clear that present-day humans possess for the first time in history a
means of thinking that can make it possible for them, without clairvoyant
experiences, to perceive the spiritual archetypes, given an
earnest application to the task. One of the ways this shows up is in Steiner's
statement, "The time of prophets is past." That is, special,
extraordinary humans (prophets) are no longer required to reveal
the rest of humanity the truths about the past, present, and future. That has
become possible today for all humans as a result of the general evolution of
humankind. One needs only the knowledge and the ability to act. The knowledge
is available and the ability to act is available.
Another point of light, actually a three-fold point of light, is the
author's connecting of the concepts of theon, logos, and change
with the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in parallel
with the three processes Steiner discusses for experiencing the spiritual world
of Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination.
[page 80] Interaction or meetings occur when the path of a particle with
quantum properties crosses the paths of other particles belonging to the
environment. It is possible to picture this through Christian symbolism. We may
view the death process of the quantum world as a process of continual
"crucifixion", as a quantum system is crossed by something belonging
to the environment. Beings of sub-nature are crossed or met by the large-scale
world. In this way real events can be produced in time and the rhythm of the
succession of these events is a language or "logos". The original
world of possibilities is that of the Father, death is connected with the Son
and the re-birth of possibilities with the Holy Spirit. What is associated with
the Holy Spirit then plays the role of Father in later interactions. This can
be directly connected with the spiritual stream of the Rosicrucians and the way
they related to the Trinity, involving birth in the Father, death in Christ and
re-birth in the Holy Spirit:
Ex Deo nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum
Sanctum reviscimus
Friedjung makes the statement, "The arrival of Europeans in America
was in many ways a disaster for the people already living there." The
arrival of Europeans in America was, rightly understood, a completion of the
original migration from the West to the East and back to the West, which the
natives of the continent had not participated in, having come directly to the
West from the original migration from Atlantis before it sank. As a result the natives
of the continent lacked the conceptual abilities of the Europeans until they
arrived on the shores of America in the 16th Century. While the cross-cultural
exchange was accompanied by disease and war, it is easy to forget that a
similar cross-cultural disaster occurred between the Romans and the Northern
European barbarians as they discovered each other's existence.
I would certainly agree with his statement that "we can expect that
real indications of soul aspects belonging to conscious beings may be found in
many situations and phenomena, not studied in this book." One of the places
one can study the soul aspects of conscious beings in psychology, and a good
place to start is Rudolf Steiner's A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit.
This next passage caught my eye because Friedjung says that Alpha
Centauri is about 90 degrees from Sirius and about half the distance that
Sirius is from the Earth. According to a recent theory, Sirius is the best candidate for a binary companion to the Earth. If
that theory has merit, it would make sense that Alpha Centauri be at right
angles to avoid the Sol-Sirius stars which have long elliptical orbits around
each other.
To my mind, nothing that Rudolf Steiner wrote about is less understood
by the majority of people who claim to be anthroposophists than the
"Three-Fold Society." Lots of abstract words and well-meaning
epithets are applied to the concept to little avail. The impression I get is
that it would be a great thing to have, if only we could force people into
accepting it. One of the veiled ways that force is talked about is by use of
the word "should", especially when it comes to changing the way
society works. People with disabilities should have wheelchair access to every
business. People without medical insurance should have some provided to them.
People without jobs should be provided an income to live off of. All children
should be provided education free of charge. If only the word
"should" could change the world by invoking it, the world would be
perfect in short order. Joanne Woodward says she has a sign over her bed that
says, "I will not should on myself today." I would modify that saying
to this, "If I must should on anybody today, let it be on myself." A
society which achieves perfection by the use of force will destroy not only its
perfection, but itself.
Only a society which separates the three-fold order of government,
economy, and culture on a completely volitional basis has a chance of building a
Three-Fold Society that will be enduring as well as endearing. One work in
addition to Steiner's on the Three-Fold Society is Citadel, Market, and Altar by Spencer Heath, and it is worth a
study.
What I have noticed is that those who would like to tell us how things
"should" be see bad guys in one or more of the three-fold aspects of
society. For some it is the government which is bad, others it is the economy
which is the malefactor, and for others the culture itself. It is easy to see
which one a particular writer chooses by noticing which one he shoulds upon:
[page 92] In particular it should be possible to overcome the present
domination of most of the world by the economy, which among other things limits
the rights of human beings and manipulates culture through the media. Let us in
this connection think of the scandal of large numbers of extremely poor people
living at the present time in very rich western countries.
The compounding of the verb "should" with the adverbs
"extremely" and "very" can be forgiven of someone who
admits that his early moral judgments were shaped by the "extreme
left". Let us think in this connection rather of a rising tide that lifts
all boats, and understand that in prosperous countries the living standards for
everyone rise as a natural consequence. The extremely poor die of starvation in
poor countries and complain of neglect in rich countries.
[page 92] The threefold social order is not a utopia, like Communism, as
I personally believed when I was younger, though it can at least partly lead to
the realization of many social ideals. It cannot eliminate all conflicts, but
can, if brought into being, improve things. However, it must be admitted that
it is extremely difficult in the present world with, among other things, a
global economy, even to start to realize a form of a threefold society; in fact
much more work needs to be done than has be realized till now, before it can be
seriously applied.
To start to realize the form of a threefold society requires that one
understand that one ubiquitous element prevents the separation of the three
areas of society, namely, force. The government forces the other two, the
economy forces the other two, and culture does its best to force the other two.
Rather than three independent folds of society, you have three folds competing
to force the other two into its submission. Everyday people who claim to want a
threefold society go around supporting political agendas which would create
some semblance of the society by force. This is to be expected in a society in
which freedom is used to apply to anything one wishes it to mean, and no extant
operational definition for the term freedom is commonly agreed upon.
How do we go about putting soul into science? Michael Friedjung sums it
up for us:
[page 93] In order to create a science that includes soul, it will be
necessary to overcome what seems to me a kind of fear of abandoning basic
assumptions. Furthermore, the world of the human soul and its inner
experiences, as well as that of the possible perception by it of physically
invisible beings, is also that of dreams and nightmares. Bringing this type of
world into a science like physics can indeed be frightening for many people.
Yes, I agree, it can be frightening for many people, but it is
frightening for the same people whose dreams already frighten them. If you
propose something they don't understand, they will accuse you of being the
cause for their frightening dreams and they will be drawn to opposing you
publicly because you have given them the boon of someone to blame their
otherwise unattributable bad dreams on.
If science is only five centuries old and in its infancy or adolescence,
as Friedjung suggests in his closing paragraph, then the concept of freedom as
an operational definition which can bring the boon to humankind of a real, and
working threefold society is still in the womb, but it is alive and only a lack
of attention will prevent it from being born alive and healthy into the world
of tomorrow. This new world can only be built one person at a time. When one
abjures coercion in any aspect of one's daily life and refuses to support in
any way those who use coercion in their lives, the days of the forces of
coercion are numbered. When one chooses cooperation over coercion, one joins a
growing band of human beings who enjoy freedom in their life. Do they
experience coercion? Yes, but as Spencer Heath said, "One must treat
coercion as one does friction in a mechanical system -- it slows things
down."
Let us hope that this tiny gem of a book may shine light into many dark
places and bring courage to those who lack it. By putting soul into science,
Michael Friedjung has helped to hand-code a Program Loader for our world
computer of human beings which will enable us all to begin to perceive the
Body, Soul, and Spirit of the life we all live, in peace and cooperation.
---------------------------- Footnotes
-----------------------------------------
Footnote 1. A new movie will be released Sept. 17, 2004
using a quantum mechanics theme. It is called, "What the #$*! Do We
Know!?" Netflix.com Blurb: 'The neurological processes
and "quantum uncertainty" of life are explored in this film. Thrust
from her mundane life into an Alice in Wonderland-like world, Amanda (Marlee
Matlin) must develop a brand-new perception of the world and the people she
interacts with.'
Return
to text directly before Footnote 1.
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Footnote 2. I am indebted to the concept of the
"profitability of morality" to Dr. Andrew Joseph Galambos, a rather amazing physicist who
created a science of morality he called, "Volitional Science". Return to text
directly before Footnote 2.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Footnote 3. As he does in "An Outline of Occult Science" aka "An Outline of Esoteric Science".
Return to text directly before
Footnote 3.
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To obtain a paperback Copy of "Putting Soul into
Science" directly from the publisher Click Here! You may
alternately purchase a copy from Amazon.
Southern Cross Review Ebooks provides an
Ebook copy free of charge and says of it: "Astro-physicist Michael
Friedjung gives an in-depth view, accessible to the non-scientist, of what
modern science could be if
stripped of its materialist trappings."
Michael Friedjung was born in 1940 in England of Austrian refugee parents who had escaped from the Nazis. He was already deeply interested in science at eleven years of age, and uniting science and spirituality eventually became his aim. He studied astronomy, obtaining a Bsc in 1961 and his Phd in 1965. After short stays in South Africa and Canada, he went to France in 1967 on a post-doctoral fellowship and later was appointed to a permanent position at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1969, where he is now Research Director. After living with the contradictions between official science and spiritual teachings, he began to see solutions to at least some of the problems, which are described in this book. [email protected]
