Diane Newell Meyer delivered this homily as part of “Humanist Sunday,” Sept. 4, 2016, at Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The Humanism Explorations group meets at RVUUF from 3 to 5 p.m. on the first and third Sunday of each month.

I fell in love with astronomy when I was in the fourth grade-and it has been one of my longest lasting relationships!

I became an atheist when I was about 13, and, as the astronomer John Dobson would say of himself, I was a “belligerent atheist”. Then when I was about 20, while at the U. of O, I questioned my place in the corporate competitive world. I discovered Zen Buddhism. The scientific part of me rejected it, but the heart part accepted it. Like so many people, I came to realize that we all are One. Several faiths talk about us as being One. Why does this feel instinctively right?
Is there any rational scientific approach that can explain or substantiate that idea?

This is difficult, as it is hard to separate the cutting edge from the lunatic fringe……
But my humanist friends and the Humanist part of me requires that it be rational.

I especially enjoy the astronomer John Dobson’s approach to this. He was both an astronomer and a Hindu mystic, having lived as a Vedantan monk in a Hindu monastery for a number of years.

Dobson talked about the fact that in India education began with fundamental questions. They asked : – Why do we see a universe that is changing, that is finite, and is divided up into small particles? In order to think of one concept, the Hindu philosopher noted that the opposite idea must also come to mind, – that the universe is changeless, infinite, and undivided. They felt that the second idea was in intuitively the underlying truth. Somewhat like Plato saw Essence or form, preceding Existence.

So how is it that we see the universe like we do?

“It can only be by mistake.” So they studied mistakes- They asked, – against what does it change?” But since change is seen only in time, and only with respect to the changeless, they saw that underlying the world which we see, there must be an existence NOT in time and space. And they also saw that the underlying existence must show through in what we see because you can’t mistake a rope for a snake without seeing the rope.
The educational background in early India was colored by the answers to questions like these which made it difficult for religious fanaticism to take hold.
In Europe and Arabia things went the other way. The underlying existence was largely overlooked and the questions were asked about the visible world. What we call science arose with its emphasis on atheistic materialism, – and it was, and still is, at war with religion. Turns out, this materialism may be at war with physics, too!

So, to the Hindus mystics, the question is : By what kind of causation could we get from the changeless to the changing? From the infinite to the finite? And from the undivided to the divided?

We cannot get there by the causation of our physics. We can’t get something from nothing. Dobson disliked the Big Bang theory for that reason. So, what happens if we look at this problem from the standpoint of what Dobson calls Apparitional Causation? A mistake in perception? It’s the kind of thing you do when you mistake a rope for a snake.

Some physicists, such as David Bohm talk about what he calls the implicate order, a holographic universe, similar to an apparition.

If, then, our physics has arisen by apparition, the changeless, the infinite and the undivided must show thru in that physics. But isn’t that exactly what we see? The changeless shows as inertia, the infinite as electricity, and the undivided as gravity. Had we not seen them somehow. it would not have shown up in our physics. Quantum mechanics has opened up these questions.

We make the perceptual mistake because it was genetically necessary. We come from a very long line of people who had to see it as real. We have been selected to discriminate. and classify and to separate. Only those who saw it that way procreated!
We see separate things as a trick of seeing them back in time. It is the mistake of seeing things in time and space. The further away you are, the farther back in time you are. We have not been selected to pay attention to this.

But we yearn for the underlying truth, nonetheless.
The physics asserts that there is no such thing as matter. There is only energy, The energy is the consequence of the apparition. It is the yearning for liberation, the freedom of infinite expansion in in the apparently finite, It is the yearning for the undivided in the apparently divided.- or love. And it is the yearning for the changeless in the apparently changing, – or Peace.

We are seeing nothing in this apparitional universe NOW, only in the past. To see it accurately now, the separation between you and me would evaporate, vanish. In other words, we would be One.

Also in this series:
Humanism and its Historical Connection to Unitarian Universalism by Roy Kindell
Christian Humanism – A Personal View by Victoria Law
How Reason Informs My Faith by Jonathan Donihue