This essay started out as a review of Peter Canova’s brilliant and fascinating book, Quantum Spirituality (quod vide).  I give the book five stars (out of five) even though I have a major disagreement of primary philosophy, because of the book’s liberating approach to the search for Truth.  The Author’s approach to the search for truth is not to rely upon either Religion (Spirituality) or Science (Materialism), but to avoid the dogmatism of either approach, looking for a Third Way.  Basically, the Author’s thesis is that The Source (Consciousness) created Matter and Energy, and all aspects of Reality.  My problem is that this begs the question.  

     Historically, neither Religion nor Science have any idea of how to deal with the ultimate question of Origin.  Religion says that God created the Cosmos.  Science says that The Universe started with a Big Bang.  When I asked my father (a Methodist minister) at the age of six, “Who created God?” the unsatisfying answer was that God always existed.  And when you ask a Scientist how the Big Bang happened (or what were the anterior circumstances or causes), he will answer, smugly, that A scientist does not speculate beyond the data.

     But Canova’s solution is no more satisfying ~ where did this famous Source or Consciousness come from ?  It begs the question just as surely as the solutions of Religion or Science.  My solution gets into some pretty dense metaphysics, but there is no easy way out of this conundrum.  The ancient idea of the Taoist philosophers was that “in the beginning” (the ain soph of the Hebrew Kabbalah, prior to any creation) there was a state of pure Nothingness, considered the ”natural” state of affairs.  Indeed, the most arresting question facing both philosophers and scientists is “why is there anything at all, instead of just Nothing?”  Heraclitus, an early Greek philosopher, roughly contemporaneous with Pythagoras, taught that “Nothing could exist by itself.  In order for anything to exist, its opposite must also exist.”  This even applies to Nothingness, itself.  In order for Nothingness to exist, the complementary idea of Being must also exist, theoretically.  This is asserted to be an a priori axiom, a fundamental quality of reality and meaning.

     Switching back to the Taoist philosophers of China, they considered that any pair of opposites could be sorted out into Yang and Yin (Expansion and Contraction), and that both extremes succeed each other by turns.  That is, when anything reaches an extreme of Yang, it reverses polarity and turns towards Yin, and vice versa.  Thus, an extreme of Nothingness will sooner or later require an inversion to its opposite, Being.  Thus, voilà, the Big Bang, followed by all the rest of the Cosmos, unfolding into greater complexity as it goes along.  From there, the evolution from Being, through Expansion and Contraction, to Matter and Energy, to Life and Death, and even Consciousness, raises no insurmountable scientific or philosophical problems.  

     Getting back to Peter Canova and Quantum Spirituality, Consciousness is taken to be a primary quality of existence in any form.  Consciousness is assumed to pervade all matter and energy as an inherent and essential quality of Being, although it enlarges in scope as the complexity increases.  At the largest scale of all, the entire Cosmos is a single field of matter/energy, which is alive and conscious.  But within this, there are multitudes of individual points of consciousness at the same time.  It is a familiar trope that “We are all One, and that any idea of separation into Subject and Object is an illusion.”  However, it is more illuminating to recognize that both views are correct at the same time !  Yes, we are all One, but we are also individual points of light, with out own unique consciousness, albeit linked within the great ocean of Being, the universal energy field which Canova calls the Source.  

     So, to sum up, rather than postulating a Source Consciousness as a pre-existing ultimate Origin which creates all matter and energy in a sequential and linear fashion, we can imagine a world that inevitably comes into Being as the flip side of Nothingness, and the Consciousness which pervades all reality as the ongoing creative force.  

     Ideo fugiet a te omnis Obscuritas.  Id est: now everything is clear, and it’s time to water the garden.   [Explore further: cosmology.htm.]

The Sun  (abposters.com)