Rosicrucian Heritage Magazine - 2009-03 - AMORC

physical phenomena and unify or explain through
a single model the theories of all the fundamental
interactions of nature. These are usually considered
to be four in number; gravity, the strong nuclear force,
the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force.
Because the weak force can transform
elementary particles from one kind into another,
the TOE should also provide a deep understanding
of the various kinds of particles as well as the
different forces. There have been numerous TOEs
proposed by theoretical physicists over the last
century, but as yet none has been able to stand up
to experimental scrutiny. The primary problem in
producing a TOE is that the accepted theories of
quantum mechanics and general relativity propose
radically different descriptions of the universe. As a
result, straightforward ways of combining the two
lead quickly to a problem in which the theory does
not give stable results for experimentally testable
quantities. Because of this a number of physicists
do not expect a TOE to be discovered.
The concept of a “theory of everything” is
rooted in the ancient idea of causality, famously
expressed by Pierre de Laplace (1749-1827)
in his Essai philosophique sur les probabilities of
1814: “An intellect which, at a
certain moment, would know all
forces that set nature in motion,
and all positions of all items of
which nature is composed…, if
this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data
to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the
movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and
those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing
would be uncertain and the future just like the past
would be present before its eyes.”
Cosmic Consciousness
That statement by Laplace looks something like
the sublime pinnacle that every Rosicrucian and
indeed every sincere mystic seeks, namely Cosmic
Consciousness. In such a state, the mystic loses all
objective awareness of self and effectively has a
realisation of what mystics term the “Universal”
or “Cosmic Mind.”
In so doing, he or she becomes aware, in an
instant, of all that has gone before and all that is
to come. The realisation is not unlike a time loop.
While in such an attunement all sense of time is lost
and everything becomes one…, past, present and
future, and it is at the same moment all of creation
wrapped up into one single realisation. But what is
The Rosicrucian Heritage -- No: 1, 2009
the Cosmic Mind? The material presented in parts
1 to 8 of this series gives us the tools to address
this question.
The Cosmic Mind
In these articles I have introduced the topics of
Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, Systems
Theory, the concept of hidden dimensions and
consciousness, from both mystical and scientific
perspectives.
In our everyday world everything seems
predictable: we push a stone and it moves; we hit
a ball and we know where it will go; the planets
revolve around stars following predictable orbits
and obeying the laws of relativity. However,
quantum mechanics introduces us to the fact that
the universe behaves in a very strange way once
we go down to space scales smaller than the atom.
Electrons and other elementary particles are not
in fact particles, but both waves of energy and
particles at the same time.
String Theory tells us that every elementary
particle arises out of the vibrations of multidimensional
objects called strings, and it is possible
that the force of gravity is multi-dimensional,
The concept of a “theory of everything” is
rooted in the ancient idea of causality.
providing mechanisms for energy exchanges across
numerous dimensions of space-time.
In Systems Theory we learned that when things
interact with each other, they exchange both
information and energy, and we used this as a
foundation for a theory of Consciousness. We put
forward the idea that strings can be conscious as
they exchange information and energy with other
strings to eventually form atoms, the basic building
blocks of molecules and hence eventually very
complex structures like ourselves.
We learnt that the level of consciousness is
related to complexity; the greater the number of
energy and information exchanges, the greater
the awareness. We also learnt that consciousness
operates in all dimensions including very large ones
of which our three-dimensional space is a small part.
If we extrapolate all of this to include everything
then we can logically say that “everything” must
be a single conscious entity, a super complex mind,
the Cosmic Mind. Let us take breath for a minute
then and recap.
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