Shankara’s Rope
So everything in the cosmos can only be understood as one thing—not as a plurality, not two. Inseparable unity is also the fundamental thought of Advaita Vedanta, a far-eastern philosophy of life. It is based on the Vedas, the oldest writings of India. For centuries, they were handed down by the great masters to the next generation. The teachings reached their peak in the 9th century A.D. under Adi Shankara who is still known today as one of the greatest philosophers and religious teachers of India.
“Shankara” comes from Sanskrit which is the liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism. It consists of sham (English: good) and kara (English: to cause), so “Shankara” is someone who causes good. The concept advaita (pronounced: “a-dvaita”) is Sanskrit also. The root word dvaita (English: duality, “two-ness”) means that something can be dissected into parts. Adding the syllable “a” to the word dvaita means that it is not correct to speak of parts. Reality is one big picture—and that’s why it has no parts.
Shankara himself loved to speak of a parable24 that he valued very highly: Someone enters a dark little shack and can’t see clearly because of the darkness. He suddenly thinks he sees a snake in front of him. Could it be a deadly snake with poisonous venom? He is petrified with fear of losing his life. But the “snake” wasn’t moving. After some time he realizes his mistake. There was no snake in front of him, just a rope coiled around itself (see figure 10).
The rope symbolizes reality, the snake an illusion. Shankara uses this metaphor to show why we experience a “dual world” although there is only one whole. Because of our uncertainty we constantly whitewash reality with illusions. Whoever confuses the rope with a poisonous snake will suffer fear and torment. But whoever sees the coiled rope for what it really is, is enlightened. According to Adi Shankara, we can overcome our lack of knowledge through meditation and thereby reach unification with Brahman, the divine soul of the world: “May this one sentence proclaim the essence of a thousand books; only Brahman is real, the world is appearance, the self is nothing but Brahman.”25
Fig. 10: Shankara’s rope
Shankara’s rope parable reminds us of Plato’s cave parable which I have already presented. Cave or shack—it really doesn’t matter—these stories show how we don’t have a good grip on reality because our senses continually lead us astray. It is astounding that two great philosophers, Shankara and Plato, who were from opposing cultures and different times arrive at a conclusion that is very similar to today’s reasoning in quantum physics: Reality is one big picture which is precisely why subject and object—observer and observed—can never truly be separated.
It is important to know that “not two” and “one” are not the same. The idea “not two” is even deeper than “one”. “Not two” means that it is absolutely indivisible. If something is “one” we can still think of it as consisting of parts. According to Shankara, reality is not only one, but also not two: one and never-two. I must not strive for understanding the rest of the world because the rest really doesn’t exist. The world is not outside of me, nor am I a part of it. There is only “the world with me”.
Darwin’s Finches
Hardly any scientist questioned our role in the world more fundamentally than the British naturalist Charles Darwin. After aborting his medical studies, he first became a theologian. The works of the British natural philosopher William Paley deeply influenced Darwin’s scientific thought which was often demonstrated in his later publications.
It was a great stroke of fate for science when Darwin was invited to take part in a circumnavigation of the globe at the age of 22. In December 1831 the young theologian launched to sea aboard the HMS Beagle. At first Darwin firmly believed that God created every kind of living thing individually. But after travelling the oceans and continents, his detailed observations of nature gave him a completely different picture: He discovered sea fossils on 12,000-feet mountain tops in South America, found close biological relationships among remotely isolated turtles living on the Galapagos islands and catalogued over 1529 species,26 which included groups of finch-like song birds also discovered on the Galapagos islands.
After his return in October 1836, he sent his work to John Gould at the museum of the Zoological Society of London.27 Gould investigated the birds and confirmed that there was no clear separation among these living phenomena: They were uniformly joined in every way. Darwin himself didn’t give them any special notice during his return trip to England. The different shapes of their beaks (see figure 11) did not escape Darwin, but he suspected that these finches represented different species.
Fig. 11: Darwin’s finches
Only after intensive conversations with Gould, Darwin was compelled to make his revolutionary interpretation of the obvious differences of the finch beaks: The birds adjusted to the various food resources that were available to them in their environment on the islands. Only the bird that had the beak that works could eat grains or insects which were available in its environment: big beaks for grains, sharp beaks for insects! Darwin’s finches represent the classic example of adaptive radiation: An original species branches into more specialized species so that it can better adjust to changing environmental conditions. Grain-eating finches, insect-eating finches, woodpecker finches and other species branched from only a few original finches on the Galapagos islands28 (see figure 12). Woodpecker finches use tiny twigs as tools to remove larvae from tree bark. The great distances among these small islands favor the development of new species. In this way, nature is successful in making use of ecological niches.
Fig. 12: Adaptive radiation
But the beaks of finch-like songbirds were just a small part of the jig-saw puzzle of Darwin’s reasoning. Taken together, his findings yielded a picture that refuted all creation biology which was considered to be universally valid at that time: The many biological species are not changeless living things created individually by a God of creation, but they develop gradually through the process of natural selection— from out of their own!
Twenty years went by until Darwin finally published his life’s work in November 1859: On the Origin of Species. 29 He made five revolutionary claims in this book:
– the changeability of all species,
– creation of species in minute progressions,
– propagation of species within populations,
– the common origin of all forms of life,
– natural selection as the pivotal mechanism of life.
To further support these claims, Darwin produced detailed scientific evidence that he had collected during and following the return of his worldwide investigation. In his Notebook B he sketched his idea of the genealogy of life for the first time.30 Beginning with the words “I think…” follows a tree that displays the biological