Preparing for the Miraculous

48 eleven talksIn recent times, however, the laws of physics, “once regardedas cast in tablets of stone,” began to look less definitive.What was once the domain of a few “eccentric” scientistslike David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake or Ilya Prigogine,is now more and more accepted by scientific orthodoxyand may soon be integrated into the standard paradigm.“As soon as the laws are confined to some abstract realmof ideal mathematical forms, there is no problem,” writesPaul Davies, “but if the laws are considered to inhabit, nota transcendent Platonic realm, but the real universe, thenit’s a very different story.” And a French scientist statessquarely: “The fundamental laws [of physics] are nowabout possibilities and no longer about certitudes.”Sri Aurobindo did not only rely on his yogic insight,he followed the evolution of science, including physics,from nearby, and in his writings one finds numerous referencesto Einstein’s relativity theories and the puzzling conclusionsof quantum mechanics. It was part of the fundamentalattitude of this “mystic” never to lose contact withreality and the world. This should be kept in mind whenreading the following passages by him. Quite aware of theconfirmations of science, he explains here that the realityof what science tries to grasp, describe and understand ismuch more complex than science even accepts. The simplebut crucial reason is that physical science has in Galileo,Descartes and Newton reduced reality to the realm of matter,declaring the other principles of what constitutes reality– life, mind, spirit – to be reducible to matter, or otherwiseto be outside the sphere of interest of serious science.“If we look carefully at these workings of Nature,” SriAurobindo writes in The Life Divine, “once we put aside theveil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in theprocess of things as natural because so they always happen,we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is a