century b.c.e., literature had nowhere to go but up. But it took a thousand years before incantations, grain tallies, and long-winded accounts of the everyday goings-on of the Pharaoh’s family gave way to genuine insight. The oldest religious text, the Sanskrit Rig Veda from around 1700 b.c.e., pondered “the Sun god’s shining power” and said, poetically, “Night and morning clash not, nor yet do linger.” Translation: Stuff happens.
By the time the Old Testament books were penned a millennium later, a key point was a stationary Earth ruled by a single, easily upset God. The rabbis of the time showed no inclination to question this prevailing worldview. They duly filled the pages of Genesis and Deuteronomy with the flat-earth, glued-in-place mindset of their time, with a strict dividing line between us mortals below and heaven above. Figuring out how nature operated was on nobody’s to-do list. Indeed, the things that provoke our curiosity today—the nature of life, and time, and consciousness, and the working of the brain—all would have seemed alien to early civilizations. Everyday survival was priority number one, behaving according to Scripture so that God wouldn’t smite you was number two, and debating issues like whether space is real never made it to the campfire agenda.
Back then, everyday life’s main illumination was the Sun and Moon, and just to make sure everyone was paying attention, these lights kept shifting position. They repeated their dog-and-pony show daily. Despite lacking any inclination to explain the natural world around them, the ancient scribes couldn’t ignore light—so central to every aspect of life—so they emphasized this topic in the opening lines of Genesis. Of the first one hundred words in the Bible, fully eight are either “darkness” or “light.”
(They may have been onto something. We will see, in our own explorations, that light, or at least energy, is indeed a central character in Reality’s puzzle.)
In that era, no one had a handle on the actual structure of the cosmos, how we perceive it, or how everything might be linked. There was insufficient information. Then, as now, people didn’t want to spin their wheels on topics that went nowhere.
But repetitions were another story. They stirred the intellect. Our brains are built to notice patterns. We readily link them with others. If the phone rings just as we sit down to dinner for six nights in a row, this isn’t going to escape our attention.
The most prominent pattern involved that blinding ball of fire. It always crossed the heavens from left to right. It faithfully rose in the east. On the incomprehensible side the Sun was obviously a god of some sort. Probing its secrets surely seemed mission impossible.
Yet “figuring stuff out” became a priority on the sunny islands of Greece some six centuries before the birth of Christ. More to our point, it opened the doors to the earliest realistic contemplations about our place in the universe. It happened because, for the first time, rationality competed with magic. Observation and logic were prized at long last.
Logic involves cause-and-effect sequences. A causes B, which then causes C. Everyone comes running from the fields after a goat shed collapses because an olive tree fell on it. The tree was knocked over by the wind. This happened at midday when the wind usually blows strongest. One of the village’s smarter men connected A with C and wondered aloud: Might the hot overhead Sun be the wind’s instigator? Hey, this was fun—uncovering a possible link between the Sun and a dead goat. The Greeks fell in love with this newfound tool of logic.
They were on the right track, but the very early Greeks— the first true practitioners of science—reached stumbling points fairly quickly. Two thousand years later, in the early seventeenth century, Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli did indeed explain why the wind blows, and it did involve the Sun. But the ancient Greeks were hampered by their need to keep their gods in the picture. So, why did the god of the west wind, Zephyrus, choose to blow at some times but not others? The villagers would shrug; the gods had their own inscrutable reasons.
If the goat was dead, Zephyrus was apparently punishing the goat herder for some transgression. Guessing the crime even became a favorite neighborhood gossip topic. Infidelity was always a good bet, although hubris could often be suspected. You couldn’t understand divine motives, so why bother trying to figure out anything? In particular, a “first cause”—what starts the ball rolling—was vexingly impossible to pin down.
Yet even if cause-and-effect rationality reached blank walls quickly, the early Greeks admirably didn’t quit. And like science even today, especially the quantum theory experiments we will explore later, the ancients had to deal with verisimilitude, a wonderful word that means “the appearance of truth.”
Something that appears true may indeed be true. Or it may not be. The Sun crossing the sky while Earth remains motionless is a verisimilitude, an appearance. It seems true. It still appears true today, which is why we say “the Sun is setting” and not “the horizon is rising.” It was an amazing leap for Aristarchus on the island of Samos, fully eighteen hundred years before Galileo, to insist that you’d observe the same effect if it was Earth that was spinning while the Sun was stationary—and that this made more sense because the smaller body should logically revolve around the larger one.1
We will try to remember this idea of verisimilitude later, when we, too, are faced with alternative ways of interpreting everyday observations.
Meanwhile, Aristotle, in his groundbreaking Physics, held the view that the universe is a single entity with a fundamental connectedness between all things, and that the cosmos is eternal. You needn’t get hung up in the cause-and-effect business, he argued in the fourth century b.c.e., because everything has always been animated and has a kind of innate life or energy to it. There is no starting point. Actually, Aristotle hardly went out on a limb to say these things, as this solipsistic view had many adherents before he arrived on the scene.
Aristotle didn’t quit there. In Book IV of Physics, he argued that time has no independent existence on its own. It only subsists when people are around; we bring it into existence through our observations. This is very much in line with modern quantum experiments. No physicist today thinks that time has an independent reality as any sort of “absolute” or universal constant.
Still, neither Aristotle, nor Plato, nor Aristarchus, could abandon the dichotomy of us mortals existing here below while above us dwelled a parallel heavenly realm inhabited by the gods.
But things were very different in the East. Even before the Roman Empire, which retained the Greek gods (albeit with new names), a main branch of South Asian thought was being codified in texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas. Their model of reality, soon known as Advaita Vedanta, was astonishingly unlike the Western worldview.
In common with Aristotle, Advaita taught that the universe is a single entity, which it called Brahmin. But unlike the Greeks, this “One” included the divine, as well as each person’s individual sense of self. All appearances of dichotomy or separateness, it insisted, are mere illusions, like a rope being mistaken for a snake. Advaita Vedānta went on to characterize this One as birthless and deathless, and essentially experienced as consciousness, a sense of being, and bliss.
Moreover, the Advaita teachers averred, realization of this was the goal of life. Not appeasement of gods, nor contributions to clergy, nor even any concern for an afterlife, but merely awakening to a full grasp of reality. Later spin-off religions such as Buddhism and Jainism retained these fundamentals. Today, the world still remains essentially divided into these basic two views of reality, Western and Eastern, dualistic and non-dualistic, that existed over a millennium ago.
The Eastern religions maintain that some individuals through the centuries have periodically enjoyed the “enlightenment” experience. That is,
