Sitaram Dass

Spirituality Does Not Need Pseudoscience

Sitaram Dass

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

The Ground of Being does not require science for it’s proof. It does not require quantum physics. Once it is tasted, it can never fully leave you, and no amount of evidence could convince you contrary to it’s existence. Once we see that we are the depth of Eternal Consciousness, then every thought, sensation, experience, and even the sense of “I” become mere clouds passing through the vast sky of Being. We still may become lost in the clouds, but we know in our hearts that the sky is there.

Once this has been awakened, God’s handiwork is seen everywhere, including in science. There, at the quantum level, at the edge of the Universe, or at the beginning of time, it seems we see the first dance of formlessness into form, where the Great Mystery flirts with our rational mind, turning over our assumptions of reality and opening us up like a Zen koan.

But it would be a mistake to look for proof in this. There is no mathematical or scientific proof for God, and trying to place one where it does not exist leads to pseudoscience. This is the mistake of many of the New Age thinkers of today. They see the miracle of the One sprinkled throughout the many, and they wish to share this with others. Many are sincere in their efforts, but nonetheless they actually widen the gap between spirituality and science by pushing away those with little patience for shoddy logic.

But if instead of looking for proof we look for poetry, then the dance of creation can delight us with each quark, black hole, and quantum superposition, awakening us to our True Nature. The universe, too, is just a cloud passing through the sky of Being, and awe and wonder are the steps towards that Great Stillness within.

From and for God

From and for God

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