and nothing separates life from death.
The Big Picture
WELCOME TO AN UNUSUAL VIEW
OF LIFE AND THE COSMOS!
There’s no holding back. I’ll get right to it. This book is devoted to the most vital core of life and health of humanity. What would a doctor from a distant galaxy say to us if we asked him for his medical opinion? To cut it short, without hesitation his diagnosis would be self-delusion!
Whoever suffers from delusion believes something that does not correspond to reality. Undaunted, he clings to his delusion although it would never withstand critical scrutiny as it handicaps and blunts each day of his life. Paranoia and megalomania are just two examples of delusions. Someone who suffers from paranoia feels that he or she is always being observed or followed—perhaps by extra-terrestrials or foreign agents. A sufferer of megalomania might feel equal to a super hero who is far better than anyone else. Psychiatrists define a delusion to be a “chronic thought disorder” whereby the patient is not aware that his or her grasp of reality deviates from “normality”.
But what would it mean if “normality” does not match reality—if we assume that the “normal” thinking of the self as an individual is false? The Latin word individuum literally means “inseparable”. It represents the smallest element of a group (like society), that is indivisible and stands alone from all of the other elements. It is certainly true that we see ourselves as the smallest elements of humanity—but do we also stand alone from each other? This might be true physically, but all that we feel, think and do is deeply influenced by the world around us and more profoundly than we can ever imagine—by others. Whoever believes that it is possible to stand apart from the world and not give it notice or any consideration, has a self-conception that is widely separated from reality. He or she suffers from self-delusion! And that shall precisely be the hypothesis we will work with in this book:
The concept of the self as an individual is false and
today’s greatest obstacle standing in the way of peace.
This hypothesis didn’t just fall out of the sky. No one comes into this world with the idea that he or she is an individual. Our two sons have taught me that “the self” can be a long and time-intensive experience at times. As soon as children learn their first words, they speak of themselves in the third person. Only after they see themselves in the mirror and begin to discover their own bodies, they eventually develop the idea of their self. This self is not fixed in stone as many people presume. We grow up and live in a world that has an enormous influence on everything that we feel, think and do—and it is always changing! Parents, teachers, friends and our fellow man affect our actions. So, isn’t it grossly incorrect to see one’s self as an individual?
My hypothesis has far-reaching consequences for both justice and human accountability: If we aren’t individuals in this world, we can’t be individually responsible for any of our actions. Yet we’re jumping to the wrong conclusion if we say that everyone may do whatever they want. A crime is always a crime. But culprits are never solely responsible for what they do—the environment shares a part as well. No one is an island; no one is good or bad alone. Whoever demands justice must never take their eyes off the big picture for which we have a common responsibility.
So what is “the big picture”? It is our world—reality— and often far different than we imagine. The Greek philosopher Plato described this 2500 years ago: His cave parable1 tells us that humanity seems trapped in a cave and can’t see the way out which is hidden by a stone. It illustrates how our view of reality is distorted (see figure 1). As long as we are not able to change the way we see things, we will think dancing shadows are reality. Only after exiting the cave will we experience reality.
Fig. 1: Plato’s cave
So, let’s take a look at reality as our next topic and put the self aside for now. As a physicist, I hope to shed some light on the darkness out there. The modern view of our world is strongly influenced by science which quickly runs into trouble whenever it attempts to reduce reality into any direct observation—its primary source of knowledge. Scientific advancement always requires a sound intuitive base to rely upon. Without it, even dedicated scientists must constantly grope in the dark. Many of the most brilliant physicists have contributed to quantum theory, a description of the microcosm. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the intuition of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schroedinger because we can picture a quantum world today even though the pictures are still blurred.
Pictures are useful, but they often conceal a great danger: If we are looking for the truth that lies within them, they can lead us down the wrong path. The authors of holy scriptures were well aware of this when they warned us not to make images or pictures of God. Pictures are incomplete and hide the reality that lies within them. Just for example, what do you see in figure 2?
Fig. 2: What do you see here?
Nine out of ten readers would tell me that they see a sunset over the ocean in figure 2. But any picture is only a snapshot of an instant in time. There is no motion of time in it like in a movie. Figure 2 shows in reality a sunrise and not a sunset!
The light of the sun provides us with all the energy necessary for life, so light is an ingredient to reality. One of the greatest mysteries in physics has always been involved with the nature of light. What is light? No one has ever been able to answer this question conclusively. Albert Einstein once said: “Fifty years of intensive thought haven’t brought me any closer to the answer of the question ’What are light quanta?’ Of course today every poor fellow thinks he knows the answer, but he’s only deceiving himself.”2
I learned in school that light was sometimes a particle or sometimes a wave, according to which experiment we try. But they both can’t be light at the same time. Particles are always spatially localized, while waves are not. Particles and waves are only pictures that we use to help us understand light, yet pictures don’t match reality. I think I know why mankind will never understand what light really is: Light is always a step ahead of us. It moves at the speed of light which we human beings can never reach because we are bound by our mass. How could we understand something which is too fast to even get ahold of?
Light is a very good example that shows how easily we mistake reality if we dissect it microscopically. But this is precisely what is being practiced today almost everywhere in modern science. Particle physicists dissect atoms into “elementary particles” hoping someday to find a universal “world formula” which can help them to better describe the world. They are pasting together a theory of everything3 feverishly, but an atom that has been dismantled loses its atomic characteristics and is no longer an atom! Molecular geneticists dissect complex forms of life into parts with the hope that they can someday get a closer look into the secret of life. They render a living thing into many parts and find genome after genome, but a dissected thing that was alive is no longer alive! Science is best suited to describe facts or processes in our world, yet it cannot explain why something is the way it is.
What can we learn from this? To get closer to the nature of reality, we can see that it doesn’t work to dissect it into pieces. Reality is a single totality which can only be understood as a whole. Even the thought of a world that I must face and choose to investigate would be fundamentally wrong. There is never a “world and me”, but at best a “world with me”. Nature is us! All suffering that we cause to her and all love