be waging it against itself!
No religion nor any nation has ever been chosen by God. To see this, we just need to behold things through the eyes of our fellow man. How divine would a God be who would take sides? Why would God do such a thing if God created all life? We need enlightenment—to understand! It is the only medicine that can stop religious self-delusion. Understanding might truly succeed with a simple piece of wisdom shared from the perspective of the Indian enlightener Mahatma Gandhi: “God has no religion.”14
Egotism, capitalism, nationalism, fundamentalism—the breeding grounds of self-delusion have now been identified. These steps will remedy them: a good general education as medicine to protect us from interhuman self-delusion, social rules against all economic self-delusion, diplomacy against all political self-delusion and enlightenment against all religious self-delusion. And since this medicine does not seem to be sufficient (self-delusion is spreading faster than ever), I add something very special on top: spiritual medicine— individually wrapped in the chapters that follow.
What is real?
Mankind is special. Wrong.
Living things made us what we are.
– Charles Darwin
Space and time are different. Wrong.
Space and time are a matter of perspective.
– Albert Einstein
The world is individual objects. Wrong.
The world is interconnected events.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Mistaken Reality
WE OFTEN SPEAK OF “TWO”.
WHEN IT IS NOT TWO.
I marvel when I see our different ways to approach reality. In the Western world we dissect it into alleged components and analyze them in the hope to understand. The Eastern world is uplifted by grasping reality as one big picture.
Looking back, analytical procedure—especially technical and medical—has made good strides for all of us, for example the development of high-resolution telescopes and microscopes. But holistic thoughts were always a step ahead of scientific quantum leaps. There were three remarkable minds from the Western world who thought holistically too: natural scientist Charles Darwin, physicist Albert Einstein and the relatively unknown philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (see figure 6).
Fig. 6: Darwin, Einstein, Whitehead
We will look at the revolutionary ideas of Darwin, Einstein and Whitehead in this chapter. Three excellent scientists have left behind a huge spiritual legacy for humanity that can help us stop self-delusion. Don’t worry—it won’t be difficult at all. I will describe everything with texts and pictures.
At first glance, Darwin, Einstein and Whitehead don’t seem to have anything at all in common. Darwin died when Einstein was only three years old. It’s true that Einstein and Whitehead met each other in 1921 at King’s College in London,15 but they couldn’t agree on a common interpretation of the theory of relativity. After that, they probably never had any further contact with each other again. Only after we take a more careful look at the work of all three of these scientists, we see that they were pursuing precisely the same secret of nature without being aware of it: Reality does not consist of parts, but it unfolds as one big picture! Each of them revealed this secret to his own scientific field by vigorously challenging traditional schools of thought. Eventually, all three scientists died without knowing that their secret would emerge in our time to be a fundamental cosmic concept.
Where does this cosmic concept pop up? And what is its meaning for us and for our one big question: Why are we here? Without giving too much away, I believe that the ideas of Darwin, Einstein and Whitehead will deeply transform our understanding of the world: Darwin with his theory of evolution, Einstein with his theory of relativity and Whitehead with his process philosophy—to interpret the world as events and not as objects.
All three theories challenge something that almost everyone assumes to be true: mankind as the crown of creation, time and space as absolute, and a world consisting of objects. In all three theories something immutable is replaced by something mutable. And all three theories overcome the separation of something which only seems to be different. Although the approaches couldn’t be more different (Darwin was working on finch beaks among other things, Einstein on space and time, Whitehead on mathematical logic), all three theories suggest that we often speak of “two” when in reality it is not two.
Two or Not Two?
That’s the question! Our senses and brain play tricks on us with reality. We perceive reality as “objects” that exist at a certain time and place—that’s why we split reality apart into space and time. But Albert Einstein will soon tell us that there is no space or time. Reality is beyond space and time. Here comes an example: How many do you see in figure 7?
Fig. 7: How many do you see here?
Figure 7 shows an apple and a pear, two pieces of fruit. Does the figure show two coins too? No, it does not. They are really the front and back of the same coin. Only because both sides are spatially separated in the figure, many people assume that they see two coins. What’s very apparent here may not be so clear in many illusions that we also assume to be reality.
We can see how distorted we perceive reality at times from experiments that verify the activity of entanglement. We physicists speak of “entangled particles” when they had once interacted somewhere and no longer act like individual objects—even when they have moved far apart from each other. Erwin Schroedinger had predicted the existence of these particles in 1935,16 but experimental proof didn’t succeed until 47 years later.17 Entangled particles can be produced with lasers and special optic crystals (see figure 8). Somehow these particles have the remarkable ability to “know” how their counterpart acts during an experiment: If the particles are simultaneously given the choice to turn left or to turn right, both particles make the same decision together. And it doesn’t matter at all how far apart they are from each other!
Fig. 8: Entangled light particles (marked red)
In order to understand the full extent of an entanglement, let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that we were not observing light particles, but cars. One car is driving to New York, the other to Washington, D.C. Entanglement means: Whenever the car in New York turns left, then the car in Washington, D.C., will simultaneously turn left as well (see figure 9). And simultaneously means: While doing this, there is no information exchanged between the two cars. What we’re really saying here is that the fastest that information can travel is at
