The Science of the Invisible

"Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" Biologist E.O. Wilson says that philosophers long ago stopped addressing these questions, believing them to be unanswerable. Scientists stepped forward to fill the vacuum, and now act as supreme arbiters of the mysteries that were once the province of philosophers.
I'm saddened by the loss. The scientific method is a tremendous tool for understanding the world, but most scientists refuse to use it to study phenomena that can't be repeated under controlled conditions and that can't be explained by current models of reality. I think it's impossible to explore the Big Three Questions without taking into account all that elusive, enigmatic, unrepeatable stuff. The more accidental, the more true.
I can at least hope the scientists won't object if the Beauty and Truth Laboratory borrows their disciplined objectivity and incisive reasoning to explore areas they regard as off-limits.
Two groups that may not mind are the astronomers and astrophysicists. More than other scientists, they've been compelled to develop an intimate relationship with invisible realms. In fact, they've come to a conclusion that's eerily similar to the assessment of shamans and mystics from virtually every culture throughout history: Most of reality is hidden from our five senses.
"Ninety-six percent of the universe is stuff we've never seen," cosmologist Michael Turner told Geoff Brumfiel in the March 13, 2003 issue of the journal *Nature.* To be exact, the cosmos is 23 percent dark matter and 73 percent dark energy, both of which are missing. All the stars and planets and moons and asteroids and comets and nebulas and gas clouds together comprise the visible four percent.
So where is the other 96 percent? No one knows. It's not only concealed from humans, it's imperceptible to the instruments humans have devised, and its whereabouts can't be predicted by any existing theories.
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What will happen as the implications of these data filter down to the other sciences? Maybe there will be a reversal of a long-term trend documented by Nature. In 1914, the magazine found that 30 percent of the world's top scientists believed in God. In a second survey in 1934, the number dropped to 15 percent, and by 1998 it was seven percent.
If the fact that most of reality is hidden doesn't spur them to reconsider the possibility of a divine presence working behind the scenes, maybe it will move them to become more sympathetic to a project like ours, which has the intention of adopting the scientific approach to an exploration of the invisible.
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Most modern intellectuals scoff at angels, dismissing them as superstitious hallucinations or New Age goofiness. But not all deep thinkers have shared their scorn. John Milton and William Blake regarded angels as worthy of their explorations. Celestial beings have also received serious treatment by Saul Bellow, E.M. Forster, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leo Tolstoy. Of course, just because smart people have considered the possibility that angels can have real effects on the material world doesn't mean they do. Still, it might be interesting to keep an open mind.
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"I believe that my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a clearing in the forest. That gods come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will try always to recognize and submit to them." —D.H. Lawrence
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Scientist Carl Sagan smoked pot. "He believed the drug enhanced his creativity and insights," wrote Keay Davidson in the *San Francisco Examiner,* quoting Sagan's pal Lester Grinspoon. "If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense," Sagan said, "or that we can become one with the universe, I may disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!'"
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The 17th-century Church fathers wouldn't look through Galileo's telescope. Why bother? Catholic doctrine was clear that moons could not possibly circle Jupiter.
Likewise, most of today's scientists refuse to consider the possibility that there have been unidentified craft flying around our skies for years. "It's absurd to think that beings from other star systems could traverse the vast distances between them and us," they declare, "so why should we even examine the so-called evidence?" Their certainty contains a giant bias: that creatures from other worlds can only have ships that are limited to the means of propulsion we have thus far discovered here on Earth.
Arthur Koestler said that to the ancient Greeks, electricity was as bizarre and unfathomable as telepathy is to us in the modern era. Yet electricity existed before it was believed in. It's just that there was no theory that proposed its existence and no mechanism to gather evidence for it. Culture had to change in order for people to be able to know where and how to look.
Today we're aware of electricity as well as black holes, X-rays, radio waves, and infrared light because we have instruments to extend our senses. But is it wise to assume that we have finally developed every sense-extending technology that will ever be invented?
When Columbus's ships first appeared on the horizon, the Arawaks on the island of Guanahaní saw them as floating monsters. They didn't have the conceptual framework to know them for what they literally were. You can't perceive what you can't conceive. An adult who has been blind all his life and through surgery is suddenly given the power of sight takes quite a while to be able to learn to interpret what he's looking at. The eye alone doesn't see. The mind and the cultural biases it has internalized interpret and shape the raw data.
Modern science is a fabulous way of understanding reality, but it's not the crown of creation. Just as meteors, dinosaurs, and electricity (and dark matter and neutrinos and gamma rays) were inconceivable and therefore not real to earlier generations, there may be phenomena here with us now that won't be real until our culture and minds and instruments evolve further. Will they include events we now call UFOs and angels? Maybe. Maybe not. Let's remain curious.
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"Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. The novel tidbits of debris were sucked up by infant suns which, in turn, created yet more atoms when their race was run. Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.
"If stars step constantly upward, why should the global interlace of humans, microbes, plants, and animals not move upward steadily as well? The horizons toward which we must soar are within us, anxious to break free, to emerge from our imaginings, then to beckon us forward into fresh realities.
"We have a mission to create, for we are evolution incarnate. We are her self-awareness, her frontal lobes and fingertips. We are second-generation star stuff come alive. We are parts of something 3.5 billion years old, but pubertal in cosmic time. We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind." —Howard Bloom, *Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century*
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Kary Mullis is the only Nobel Prize-winning scientist ever to suggest that some aspects of astrology are valid. He's also the most distinguished prodigy in history to have described a close encounter with a UFO. When he's not doing pioneering research on the human genome, he likes to surf and explore shamanism.
"He's a scientific genius with a vibrant soul," said a critic who reviewed his autobiography *Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.* "There is nothing too preposterous for him to rigorously investigate and learn something valuable from, just as there are few commonly held truths in which he cannot find some fundamental fallacy."
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Physicist Roger Penrose, who helped to develop the theories about black holes, has said that the chance of an ordered universe happening at random is nil: one in 10 to the 10th to the 30th, a number so large that if you programmed a computer to write a million zeros per second, it would take a million times the age of the universe just to write the number down.
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"The big bang is so preposterous," says renowned astronomer Allan Sandage, co-discoverer of the quasar, "and the chain of events it set off so unlikely, that it makes most sense when thought of as a 'miracle.'"
For the sake of argument, let's assume Sandage is right. If the very beginning of the universe itself was a miracle, then everything in it is impregnated with the possibility of smaller but equally marvelous miracles.
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"When a scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong," said Arthur C. Clarke, who, due to his contributions to science, has had an asteroid and dinosaur species named after him.
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"The laws of physics appear 'fine tuned' for our existence. Even slight deviations in the laws would result in a universe devoid of stars and life. If, for instance, the force of gravity were just a few percent weaker it could not squeeze and heat the matter inside stars to the millions of degrees that are necessary to trigger sunlight generating nuclear reactions. If gravity were only a few percent stronger, however, it would heat up stars, causing them to consume their fuel faster. They would not exist for the billions of years needed for evolution to produce intelligence. This kind of fine tuning is widespread." —Marcus Chown, "Radical Science: Did Angels Create the Universe?," *The Independent,* March 15, 2002
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Science: looking for a black cat in a dark room. Philosophy: looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no black cat. Psychoanalysis: looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no black cat—and finding it. Beauty and Truth Laboratory: looking for a black cat in a dark room and finding it.
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Once the full impact of Einstein's theory of relativity became clear, an admiring journalist interviewed him about the process by which he'd arrived at the revolutionary breakthrough. "How did you do it?" the journalist asked. "I ignored an axiom," Einstein replied.
To be clear, the revolutionary scientist didn't say he'd ignored an opinion or theory, but rather an idea so well-established that it was regarded as self-evident. Furthermore, he didn't say he rebelled or fought against the axiom: He simply acted as if it weren't there.
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"Something unknown is doing we don't know what." —Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, "one of three persons in the world who understood Einstein's theory of general relativity"
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Dear scientists: We pledge to summon our finest analytical intelligence and use impeccable logic as we experiment with the hypothesis that there is no contradiction between cultivating scrupulous critical thinking and communing with the part of reality that's hidden from our senses. —Love, the Beauty and Truth Lab
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"Nature loves to hide." -Heraclitus
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The Beauty and Truth Laboratory's understanding of the science of the invisible has been made possible by the horoscopes cast and interpreted by pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler, and by the thousands of manuscript pages and many years that seminal scientist Isaac Newton devoted to his consuming passion of alchemy.


And I randomly picked a horoscope to put on here. Happens to be someone's. Enjoy!

Virgo Horoscope for week of April 20, 2006
In early spring, some of our forebears made love in newly seeded fields, hoping to magically propitiate the growth of the crops. Right now would be an excellent time for you to perform a similar ritual on behalf of what you love. If you're game, find a secluded outdoor spot on a warm day. Bring a partner if one's available, or take the earth or sky as your lover. Then carry out a rite of pleasure in which you offer up the spiritual essence of your bliss to the health and success of a beloved person or creature or situation that you want to thrive in the coming months.

And here's the picture that accompanies it:














And the accompaning "Sacred Advertisment":
Novel intuitions are erupting from your smart heart, awakening you from any trance you've been ensnared in. You're breaking and escaping obstructions that have suppressed your brilliance. Your soul's code is unleashing itself, revealing in explosive precision why you're a miraculous work of art, proving with intricate artistry why you're a masterpiece unlike any other ever created in the history of the world.

And here's my horoscope:

Capricorn Horoscope for week of April 20, 2006

In his book False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear, Dr. Marc K. Siegel argues that our circumstances are far better than we've been conditioned to believe. In fact, only a fraction of our culture's histrionic pessimism is justified. Alas, the collective delusion that life is totally messed up has seeped into your personal life (as it has into mine and everyone's), tainting even your most intimate moments. But in the coming weeks, it's crucial that you fight to undo the brainwashing. Opportunities will be coming your way that will remain inaccessible if you're too busy indulging in knee-jerk cynicism. So please resist the hypnotic temptation to look for the worst in everything. Be a fiercely buoyant nonconformist. Make this Nietzschean principle your watchword: Optimism tends to engender good health, while pessimism leads to morbidity.

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT A Spell to Commit Pronoia, by psychotherapist Jennifer Welwood:
Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game;
To play it is pure delight,
To honor it is true devotion.