Binding Chaos: Ancient and Modern

For the inner reality of man is a demarcation line between the shadow and the light, a place where the two seas meet; it is the lowest point on the arc of descent, and therefore is it capable of gaining all the grades above.

(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 130)

He hath let loose the two seas, that they meet each other: Between them is a barrier which they overpass not. Which then of the bounties of your Lord will ye deny? From each He bringeth up greater and lesser pearls.

(Qur'án 55:19-20)

           

If, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha asserts: “Man is the microcosm; and the infinite universe, the macrocosm. The mysteries of the greater world, or macrocosm, are expressed or revealed in the lesser world, the microcosm….Likewise, the greater world, the macrocosm, is latent and miniatured in the lesser world, or microcosm, of man,” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 69-70), then the inner and outer relations of the human reality described by ‘Abdu’l-Baha in the first quote are mirrored in the cosmological relations between cosmos and universe stated in the Qur’an.  This post will explore the cosmos/universe part.

The theme of two seas separated by a barrier is not limited to the Qur’an and the citations from the Bahá’i Writings from the Qur’an.  The opening verses of the first book of the Bible read:

          “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1: 1-2, 6-10)

There are also hints and allusions in the Hermetic literature to these matters, which preceded all of the above.  These give us a sense of what the metaphor “sea” means in spiritual literature.  It means, in the language of modern physics, an unbounded potential bound into an actuality.

In hermetic literature the common and universal matter is the prima materia.  It contained within itself the four elements of all that is, viz., fire, air, water, and earth, by the mixture and motion of which the forms of all earthly things are impressed upon their subjects.  

‘Abdu’l-Baha names this same original substance One Matter.  “It is necessary, therefore, that we should know what each of the important existences was in the beginning—for there is no doubt that in the beginning the origin was one: the origin of all numbers is one and not two. Then it is evident that in the beginning matter was one, and that one matter appeared in different aspects in each element. Thus various forms were produced, and these various aspects as they were produced became permanent, and each element was specialized. But this permanence was not definite, and did not attain realization and perfect existence until after a very long time. Then these elements became composed, and organized and combined in infinite forms; or rather from the composition and combination of these elements innumerable beings appeared.” (Some Answered Questions: 181)

This original matter was also called chaos.  The Greek word "chaos" (χάος), a neuter noun, means "yawning" or "gap", meaning there is no form to it.  (What I have been calling the resonant interval) Yet, as the Master and others describe it, all forms come out of it.  Its most common poetic image is that of water.  Remember the Biblical verses say in the beginning the earth “was without form, and void”.  It lacked, that is, a formal cause or imprint of essential form that would limit and define it.  “Darkness was upon the face of the deep” until “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”  Thus, the waters precede all else. 

Today we might call this formless, universal physical energy Zero-point energy, or the zero-point field or quantum vacuum, which is actually a plenum.  The zero-point energy field underlies all material creation which arises out from it. This field holds infinite energy, is capable of assuming any vibrational frequency by a process we can call filtering, and is the one agency enabling the changing of vibrational tone and hence the structure of any piece of matter.

Thus, the void or formless energy is not empty, (i.e. a vacuum) a notion that is a product of conceptual abstract thinking, but is, rather, a roiling, seething plenum of possibility—whatevers—i.e. potentials awaiting actuality or existence.  It surrounds, penetrates and diffuses the world of existence, being, in a sense, the essential substance of the world of existence.  It is chaos to a later cosmos, which is chaos bound or fixed by form.

Now scripture speaks of two seas.  I believe that these are the seas of primal matter (chaos)—Blake, about a century before quantum mechanics, called this the “sea of time and space”—and the boundless sea of thought which imprints form on chaos.  The sea of thought is the world of forms.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha says that: “Thoughts are a boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life.” (The Secret of Divine Civilization: 109-110)

The two seas are not connected, because they are a conjunction of opposites, “shadow and light”, though, together, they form one reality, like the soul and body of the human individual.  The Qur’an speaks of a barrier over which they cannot cross.  In the Biblical terminology God creates a “firmament in the midst of the waters” to divide “the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.”  The firmament is called heaven.  Still later the waters below the firmament are gathered together into a sea so that “the dry land” of Earth could appear.  With this step there is established a clear ontological barrier separating heaven, the boundless infinity, from earth, the bounded infinity, though they are related in the manner of painter, picture to paint, and painting.  But what is the barrier called firmament?  In brief, it is the formal cause; the one thought from the boundless sea of thought, or, in the language of quantum mechanics, the one observation from the infinite possibilities of observation, that gives definition, or reality, that is the thing.  This oldest of stories has just recently had a fresh cosmological retelling.

From the origin of the universe described in early Genesis let’s skip ahead several billion years to the latter part of the twentieth-century A.D. when cosmological physicists are speculating on the structure of the universe with new theories called Loop Quantum Gravity and Loop Quantum Cosmology.  Loop Quantum Gravity is an attempt to merge quantum mechanics and general relativity.  Its chief rival, String Theory, developed earlier, attempts to do the same. 

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity lead to conclusions that the known universe was bookended by what are known as singularities (Black Holes and Big Bangs)—i.e. the Big Bang universe would expand to some unknowable limit and then contract into the Big Crunch.  Spacetime, that is, could symmetrically expand to infinity and then contract infinitely.  Hence the mathematics of this approach lead to infinities—very hard things to capture in numbers.  So, these unwanted pests were “renormalized” out by defining parameters.

Now, being an infinity in science is the same as being “without form and void” in scripture.  Then this new loop theory came out which put a firmament between the two original seas—notions about which physicists knew little and cared less—for it made the physical universe finite.  It all had to do with how one conceives of gravity—a very grave situation, indeed.

According to Einstein, gravity is not a generalized force.  It is, rather, a property of space-time itself.  That is, in Einstein’s General Relativity Theory physical entities are located with respect to one another only and not with respect to some spacetime manifold.  Space-time as a "container" within which physics takes place has no objective physical meaning and instead the gravitational interaction is represented as just one of the fields forming a world.  Gravity is a manifestation of the geometry of spacetime.—no one field, rather, fields within fields, each unique.

Loop quantum gravity is an attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity based directly on Einstein's geometrical formulation. It attempts to describe the quantum properties of the universe and gravity. Hence it is also a theory of quantum spacetime.  Loop quantum cosmology is a finite, symmetry-reduced model of loop quantum gravity that predicts a "quantum bridge" (a firmament) between the contracting and expanding cosmological branches. 

If it all seems pretty loopy, that’s because loop quantum gravity imagines spacetime as a set of interlocked loops. In this theory spacetime cannot be divided infinitely into smaller and smaller pieces. There is an unimaginably small but still finite dimension called the Planck length, which is approximately 10⁻³⁵ meters, beyond which one cannot divide spacetime.  It is the smallest piece of space. The finiteness of this quantum of space enables the theory of loop quantum gravity to escape some of the ugly infinite solutions that results when one tries to combine the mathematics of standard quantum mechanics with that of general relativity—i.e. space is no longer bound by infinity of lengths, because, according to the theory, there is no meaning to distance at scales smaller than the Planck scale. Therefore, Loop Quantum Gravity predicts that not just matter, but space itself, has an atomic structure.  It is not a smooth continuum, but granular, like commercial sugar.  The granularity is a direct consequence of the quantization. In other words, there is a smallest possible length to space. 

Loop quantum gravity theory stops the universe from being bounded by singularities.  Space cannot expand or contract to infinity, but must stop at some point in both directions.  Once singularities are resolved, the big bang is replaced by a quantum bounce.

If there is a smallest possible piece of space, is time also quantized?  If so, then time, like space, has a physical reality and is finite. The quantum of time beyond which there is no way to divide time is the time it takes for a photon traveling at the speed of light (c) to travel a plank unit, roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds.  A time interval smaller than that may never be possible to measure, but it is still finite.

Thus the two things that have long been considered infinite, space and time, have been removed as infinities from the equations of physics and made finite. Thus no matter what the conditions are in the universe, everything is finite.

If this smallest distance possible cannot be further divided, and time itself has a smallest finite limit, a firmament—a thought that defines the universe finitely—dividing the upper from the lower arises in the midst of the waters, a barrier, the Planck unit, beyond which the seas cannot cross is created.  Science, scripture, and the Hermetic literature all agree that chaos, the physical universe, is finite and bounded.  The sea of thought remains a boundless infinity. 

In the microcosm of the “inner reality” of the human being, this relation between its two opposing aspects, soul and body, holds.  There, at the conjunction of “the shadow and the light” “the two seas meet” at “the end of the arc of descent” which both ends in materialities, (body) and is from where the soul starts its spiritual journey. 

In the macrocosm, every wave from the “boundless sea” of infinite divine thought, each revelation, when applied to the finite universe opposing it is a firmament that creates “the effects and varying conditions of existence” that “are the separate forms and individual limits of the waves”.  Thus He says in another place that links the human reality and the cosmos: 'Praise be to the all-perceiving, the ever-abiding Lord Who, from a dewdrop out of the ocean of His grace, hath reared a firmament of existence, adorned it with the stars of knowledge, and admitted man into the lofty court of insight and understanding."  (Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity: 3)