Tao Articles

Inside:

1. How to Cultivate Original Breath (Yuan Chi) during Winter Solstice

2. Tune into Asheville Solstice meditation Sat. Dec. 20, 7-12 pm

3. A brief history of Winter Solstice as source of Christmas, etc.

4. Instruction for downloading free Inner Smile Ebook
(this may duplicate letter sent to private lists)

Dear Lovers of the Natural Effortless Way,

There is a new moon coming on December 23. For the savvy cultivators of
chi kung (qigong), it is not an ordinary new moon. What makes it many times
more powerful is its nearly simultaneous conjunction with the Winter
Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and historically the source for all
Christmas and yuletide celebrations. Let me explain, so you can take
advantage of the free ride being offered by Nature.

Winter Solstice is a regular opening of the cosmic gates in which the
deep yin or receptive chi of the earth opens up to a vast flow of Original
Chi (yuan qi). Original chi is the subtle breath of the Tao that exhales or
expands out as yang chi and inhales back to the center as yin chi. This
original chi field is the hidden continuum aligning the inner energetic axis
connecting the earth, the sun, and the pole star/stellar field. You might
ask, what good does that do us humans?

The centerpiece of Daoist (Taoist) theory is that the human body is a
microcosm of the larger universe (macrocosm). That is the idea of the famous
Daoist meditation, the “micro-cosmic orbit” – we are designed to imitate the
flow of nature inside our own body. So if the earth opens her inner womb at
Winter Solstice to receive an orgasmic in-rush of heavenly chi, our human
bodies naturally resonate with that event.

The timing of the new moon intensifies it greatly. If we are aware of
this powerful subtle cosmic process, we can use the conjuction of the
solar-lunar process to capture the Original Breath of the universe within
our personal body-mind vessel. Growing the original chi within us is the
main focus of inner alchemy, and it offers us not only long healthy life but
deepens our freedom to create what we truly need in life.

The beauty of cultivating Original Chi during the Solstice is it is the
only type of chi that is beneficial to all people in all places, regardless
of their type of chi imbalance. We are ALL in some state of un-balance. We
are here on planet earth to activate our will to achieve balance and
harmony. This is what drives our need to complete our destiny. It the
imbalances we are born with or acquire from living in human society that
create the desires driving us to be who we are destined to be.

Original Chi is core energy from the universal matrix or primordial chi
field,, also called Source chi in Chinese medicine. It spontaneously mutates
into whatever is needed for achieving optimum balance. Our bodies have
undifferentiated stem cells that convert themselves into brain, heart, or
bone cells. Original chi does the same thing for our subtle field, known as
our Energy Body. This yuan/neutral chi becomes either yin/receptive or
yang/projective chi flowing in our meridians, and these are the building
blocks of our body-mind. So Solstice is a great time to nourish your
body-mind.

This conjunction of maximum Solar Yin at the Winter Solstice and a Lunar
New Moon is a big event lasting several days. But the most intense solar
moment would technically be at midnight on Sunday Dec. 21 (a few hours
before the exact Winter Solstice on Dec. 22). Midnight is the maximum yin in
the daily cycle, giving you a ?triple whammy of Great Yin? or the Dark
Goddess as it would be described mythologically. An equally intense but
slightly more lunar moment would be at midnight on Monday Dec. 22, the
midpoint between the new moon on Dec. 23 and Winter Solstice on Dec. 22.

When the chi field reaches a maximum yin state, it automatically flips
into its opposite polarity, the six month yang cycle of spring and summer,
which will be amplified by the cycle of full (or yang) moons during that
period. If you live south of the equator your current experience will be
just the opposite.

It is in the process of flipping from yin to yang that the chi field has
to first shift into neutral “gear”, the yuan chi that lubricates the
yin-yang cycle. This deeper layer of neutral force opens up greater
possibilities for cultivating Original Chi than any other day of the year,
except for the possible conjunction of full moon at a Summer Solstice.

My wife Joyce and I regularly invite local meditators into our home to
celebrate this cosmic transition and to use our collective power to tap the
cosmic forces for personal growth. Many people have some of their deepest
experiences at these extended meditations, which go from 7 pm to 11:30 pm in
three sittings. Most use the Taoist Emperor position for meditation, sitting
in a chair, as it is more grounded than cross legged and allows for longer
meditations. Having your feet on earth lets you receive the deep earth chi
more completely. Standing meditation is also extremely powerful at this
time.

I urge you to get family and friends together for the same purpose. For
convenience I have my meditation this year on Saturday, Dec. 20, 7 pm ? 12
pm EST and you are most welcome to tune in from wherever you are. The chi
field is what connects us all instantaneously so you can directly share this
intense experience by simply holding a clear intention and being as
receptive as possible.

Of course, Winter Solstice is the time of greatest receptivity in the
annual cycle, so just doing the Inner Smile at this time will be powerful.
(If you don?t know this meditation, see instructions below for downloading
the free ebook, The Way of the Inner Smile). If you know other Taoist
meditations like the Orbit, Fusion of the Five Elements, or Water and Fire
Inner Alchemy (Kan & Li), you will find them most productive by doing them
in a yin fashion.

This means being gentle, inviting and allowing the chi field to work
inside you instead of trying to direct it. It means surrendering to the
natural cycle of chi flowing to the center of the cosmic womb. Opening your
inner heart and smiling within will open up many new layers of consciousness
to you. This allows the deepest rebirth of the Inner Light that Winter
Solstice acts out for us on the outer planes. (For more on the difference
between yin practice, yang practice, and entering the wu wei state, see the
articles page on www.healingdao.com).

——————————————————————

A Brief History of Winter Solstice

(excerpted from: www.religioustolerance.org/winter_solstice.htm

ANCIENT EGYPT: The god-man/savior Osiris died and was entombed on DEC-21.
“At midnight, the priests emerged from an inner shrine crying ‘The Virgin
has brought forth! The light is waxing” and showing the image of a baby to
the worshipers.”

ANCIENT GREECE: The winter solstice ritual was called Lenaea, the Festival
of the Wild Women. In very ancient times, a man representing the harvest god
Dionysos was torn to pieces and eaten by a gang of women on this day. Later
in the ritual, Dionysos would be reborn as a baby. By classical times, the
human sacrifice had been replaced by the killing of a goat. The women’s role
had changed to that of funeral mourners and observers of the birth.

ANCIENT ROME: Saturnalia began as a feast day for Saturn on DEC-17 and of
Ops (DEC-19). About 50 BCE, both were later converted into two day
celebrations. During the Empire, the festivals were combined to cover a full
week: DEC-17 to 23.

By the third century CE, there were many religions and spiritual mysteries
being followed within the Roman Empire. Many, if not most, celebrated the
birth of their god-man near the time of the solstice. Emperor Aurelian (270
to 275 CE) blended a number of Pagan solstice celebrations of the nativity
of such god-men/saviors as Appolo, Attis, Baal, Dionysus, Helios, Hercules,
Horus, Mithra, Osiris, Perseus, and Theseus into a single festival called
the “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun” on DEC-25. At the time, Mithraism and
Christianity were fierce competitors. Aurelian had even declared Mithraism
the official religion of the Roman Empire in 274 CE. Christianity won out by
becoming the new official religion in the 4th century CE.

Note: As a Taoist/Daoist cultivator, I find it simplest to tune in directly
to the sun and moon directly and open to them as living beings. But this
doesn’t conflict with the numerous cultural-mythological interpretations
that you may be partial to. Use whatever feeds your creative imagination and
liberates your chi flow!

note: I’m posting this piece, as it highlights what I perceive as the need for a spiritual science to bridge the gap between religion and hard science. I accept Davies premise that physics is based on faith when you examine its bedrock beliefs. I believe eventually Taoist practices will play an important part in developing that spiritual science, mostly because it has a clean set of unity, yin-yang and five phase principles that are personally testable thorugh qigong and meditation practice. – Michael

TAKING SCIENCE ON FAITH by Paul Davies

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion ? all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” ? imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth ? and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are ? they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality ? the laws of physics ? only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe ? one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith ? namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

[First published as an OpEd piece by The New York Times, November 24, 2007]

PAUL C. DAVIES is the director of Beyond, a research center at Arizona State University, and the author of “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life.”

Note: The idea of a “field” is at the root of Taoist energetic science – the yin,yang, and yuan principles of the Life Force being the governing field that guides all manifestation and holds all memory. I find Sheldrake’s attempt to integrate field theory with modern genetic discoveries and Darwinian ideas on evolution to be most convincing, and in resonance with ancient Taoist ideas, presented in a modern complex that stresses verifiable detail. – Michael

Evolution Depends on Memory Held in Fields of Morphic Resonance

by Rupert Sheldrake

Biologist, London; Author of The Presence of the Past

I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.

There is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space.

Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe.

If we want to stick to the idea of natural laws, we could say that as nature itself evolves, the laws of nature also evolve, just as human laws evolve over time. But then how would natural laws be remembered or enforced? The law metaphor is embarrassingly anthropomorphic. Habits are less human-centred. Many kinds of organisms have habits, but only humans have laws.

Habits are subject to natural selection; and the more often they are repeated, the more probable they become, other things being equal. Animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the habits of our languages.

The habits of nature depend on non-local similarity reinforcement. Through a kind of resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species and each kind of self-organizing system a collective memory.

Is this just a vague philosophical idea? I believe it can be formulated as a testable scientific hypothesis.

My interest in evolutionary habits arose when I was engaged in research in developmental biology, and was reinforced by reading Charles Darwin, for whom the habits of organisms were of central importance. As Francis Huxley has pointed out, Darwin’s most famous book could more appropriately have been entitled The Origin of Habits.

Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.

All cells come from other cells, and all cells inherit fields of organization. Genes are part of this organization. They play an essential role. But they do not explain the organization itself. Why not?

Thanks to molecular biology, we know what genes do. They enable organisms to make particular proteins. Other genes are involved in the control of protein synthesis. Identifiable genes are switched on and particular proteins made at the beginning of new developmental processes. Some of these developmental switch genes, like the Hox genes in fruit flies, worms, fish and mammals, are very similar. In evolutionary terms, they are highly conserved. But switching on genes such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies would not look different from us.

Many organisms live as free cells, including many yeasts, bacteria and amoebas. Some form complex mineral skeletons, as in diatoms and radiolarians, spectacularly pictured in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel. Just making the right proteins at the right times cannot explain such structures without many other forces coming into play, including the organizing activity of cell membranes and microtubules.

Most developmental biologists accept the need for a holistic or integrative conception of living organization. Otherwise biology will go on floundering, even drowning, in oceans of data, as yet more genomes are sequenced, genes are cloned and proteins are characterized.

I suspect that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on the otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.

Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I believe, but cannot prove, that they are transmitted by a kind of non-local resonance, and I have suggested the term morphic resonance for this process.

The fields organizing the activity of the nervous system are likewise inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory. The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans.

Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past become present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before.

Others may prefer to dispense with the idea of fields and explain the evolution of organization in some other way, perhaps using more general terms like “emergent systems properties”. But whatever the details of the models, I believe that the natural selection of habits will play an essential part in any integrated theory of evolution, including not just biological evolution, but also physical, chemical, cosmic, social, mental and cultural evolution.

Note: This is a marvelous conversation amongst seminal physicists of the 20th century, when religion was still a discussable topic. Objective vs. subjective, free will, ethics vs. science are all debated in a lively and readable manner. I post this because it gives an excellent framework for viewing the underlying values of Harmony and Balance in Taoism, and the importance laid on evolving change and virtue embedded in its “religious natural science”. – Michael Winn

SCIENCE AND RELIGION
By Werner Heisenberg
From Physics and Beyond, By Werner Heisenberg, (Harper & Row, 1971). Republished in Physics And Philosophy: The Evolution Of Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg, (Harper Perrennial, 2007).

WERNER HEISENBERG (1901?1976) was born in W?rzberg, Germany, and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Munich. He became famous for his groundbreaking Uncertainty (or Indeterminacy) Principle and was the recipient of The Nobel Prize in Physics 1932. After World War II he was named director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

One evening during the Solvay Conference, some of the younger members stayed behind in the lounge of the hotel. This group included Wolfgang Pauli and myself, and was soon afterward joined by Paul Dirac. One of us said: “Einstein keeps talking about God: what are we to make of that? It is extremely difficult to imagine that a scientist like Einstein should have such strong ties with a religious tradition.”

“Not so much Einstein as Max Planck,” someone objected. “From some of Planck’s utterances it would seem that he sees no contradiction between religion and science, indeed that he believes the two are perfectly compatible.”

I was asked what I knew of Planck’s views on the subject, and what I thought myself. I had spoken to Planck on only a few occasions, mostly about physics and not about general questions, but I was acquainted with some of Planck’s close friends, who had told me a great deal about his attitude.

“I assume,” I must have replied, “that Planck considers religion and science compatible because, in his view, they refer to quite distinct facets of reality. Science deals with the objective, material world. It invites us to make accurate statements about objective reality and to grasp its interconnections. Religion, on the other hand, deals with the world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do, not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. In short, the conflict between the two, which has been raging since the eighteenth century, seems founded on a misunderstanding, or, more precisely, on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statements.

Needless to say, the result makes no sense at all. This view, which I know so well from my parents, associates the two realms with the objective and subjective aspects of the world respectively. Science is, so to speak, the manner in which we confront, in which we argue about, the objective side of reality. Religious faith, on the other hand, is the expression of the subjective decisions that help us choose the standards by which we propose to act and live. Admittedly, we generally make these decisions in accordance with the attitudes of the group to which we belong, be it our family, nation, or culture. Our decisions are strongly influenced by educational and environmental factors, but in the final analysis they are subjective and hence not governed by the ‘true or false’ criterion.

Max Planck, if I understand him rightly, has used this freedom and come down squarely on the side of the Christian tradition. His thoughts and actions, particularly as they affect his personal relationships, fit perfectly into the framework of this tradition, and no one will respect him the less for it. As far as he is concerned, therefore, the two realms?the objective and the subjective facets of the world?are quite separate, but I must confess that I myself do not feel altogether happy about this separation. I doubt whether human societies can live with so sharp a distinction between knowledge and faith.”

Wolfgang shared my concern. “It’s all bound to end in tears,” he said. “At the dawn of religion, all the knowledge of a particular community fitted into a spiritual framework, based largely on religious values and ideas. The spiritual framework itself had to be within the grasp of the simplest member of the community, even if its parables and images conveyed no more than the vaguest hint as to their underlying values and ideas. But if he himself is to live by these values, the average man has to be convinced that the spiritual framework embraces the entire wisdom of his society. For ‘believing’ does not to him mean ‘taking for granted,’ but rather ‘trusting in the guidance’ of accepted values. That is why society is in such danger whenever fresh knowledge threatens to explode the old spiritual forms.

The complete separation of knowledge and faith can at best be an emergency measure, afford some temporary relief. In western culture, for instance, we may well reach the point in the not too distant future where the parables and images of the old religions will have lost their persuasive force even for the average person; when that happens, I am afraid that all the old ethics will collapse like a house of cards and that unimaginable horrors will be perpetrated. In brief, I cannot really endorse Planck’s philosophy, even if it is logically valid and even though I respect the human attitudes to which it gives rise.

“Einstein’s conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don’t believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as [Einstein] he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point.

“A starting point for what?” I asked. “If you consider man’s attitude to the central order a purely personal matter, then you may agree with Einstein’s view, but then you must also concede that nothing at all follows from this view.”

“Perhaps it does,” Wolfgang replied. “The development of science during the past two centuries has certainly changed man’s thinking, even outside the Christian West. Hence it matters quite a bit what physicists think. And it was precisely the idea of an objective world running its course in time and space according to strict causal laws that produced a sharp clash between science and the spiritual formulations of the various religions. If science goes beyond this strict view?and it has done just that with relativity theory and is likely to go even further with quantum theory?then the relationship between science and the contents religions try to express must change once again. Perhaps science, by revealing the existence of new relationships during the past thirty years, may have lent our thought much greater depth.

The concept of complementarity, for instance, which Niels Bohr considers so crucial to the interpretation of quantum theory, was by no means unknown to philosophers, even if they did not express it so succinctly. However, its very appearance in the exact sciences has constituted a decisive change: the idea of material objects that are completely independent of the manner in which we observe them proved to be nothing but an abstract extrapolation, something that has no counterpart in nature. In Asiatic philosophy and Eastern religions we fined the complementary idea of a pure subject of knowledge, one that confronts no object. This idea, too, will prove an abstract extrapolation, corresponding to no spiritual or mental reality.

If we think about the wider context, we may in the future be forced to keep a middle course between these extremes, perhaps the one charted by Bohr’s complementarity concept. Any science that adapts itself to this form of thinking will not only be more tolerant of the different forms of religion, but, having a wider overall view, may also contribute to the world of values.”

Paul Dirac had joined us in the meantime. He [Paul Dirac] had only just turned twenty-five, and had little time for tolerance. “I don’t know why we are talking about religion,” he objected. “If we are honest?and scientists have to be?we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented.

“If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards?in heaven if not on earth?all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”

“You are simply judging religion by its political abuses,” I objected, “and since most things in this world can be abused?even the Communist ideology which you recently propounded?all such judgments are inadmissible. After all, there will always be human societies, and these must find a common language in which they can speak about life and death, and about the wider context in which their lives are set. The spiritual forms that have developed historically out of this search for a common language must have had a great persuasive force?how else could so many people have lived by them for so many centuries? Religion can’t be dismissed as simply all that. But perhaps you are drawn to another religion, such as the old Chinese, in which the idea of a personal God does not occur?”

“I dislike religious myths on principle,” Dirac replied, “if only because the myths of the different religions contradict one another. After all, it was purely by chance that I was born in Europe and not in Asia, and that is surely no criterion for judging what is true or what I ought to believe. And I can only believe what is true. As for right action, I can deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I find myself: I live in society with others, to whom, in principle, I must grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a fair balance; no more can be asked of me. All this talk about God’s will, about sin and repentance, about a world beyond by which we must direct our lives, only serves to disguise the sober truth. Belief in God merely encourages us to think that God wills us to submit to a higher force, and it is this idea which helps to preserve social structures that may have been perfectly good in their day but no longer fit the modern world. All your talk of a wider context and the like strikes me as quite unacceptable. Life, when all is said and done, is just like science: we come up against difficulties and have to solve them. And we can never solve more than one difficulty at a time; your wider context is nothing but a mental superstructure added a posteriori.”

And so the discussion continued, and we were all of us surprised to notice that Wolfgang was keeping so silent. He would pull a long face or smile rather maliciously from time to time, but he said nothing. In the end, we had to ask him to tell us what he thought. He seemed a little surprised and then said: “Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.'” We all laughed, including Dirac, and this brought our evening in the hotel lounge to a close.

Some time later, probably in Copenhagen, I told Niels about our conversation. He immediately jumped to the defense of the youngest member of our circle. “I consider it marvelous,” he said, “that Paul should be so uncompromising in his defense of all that can be expressed in clear and logical language. He believes that what can be said at all can be said clearly?or, as Wittgenstein put it, that ‘whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’ Whenever Dirac sends me a manuscript, the writing is so neat and free of corrections that merely looking at it is an aesthetic pleasure. If I suggest even minor changes, Paul becomes terribly unhappy and generally changes nothing at all. His work is, in any case, quite brilliant. Recently the two of us went to an exhibition which included a glorious gray-blue seascape by Manet. In the foreground was a boat, and beside it, in the water, a dark gray spot, whose meaning was not quite clear. Dirac said, ‘This spot is not admissible.’ A strange way of looking at art, but he was probably quite right. In a good work of art, just as in a good piece of scientific work, every detail must be laid down quite unequivocally; there can be no room for mere accident.

“Still, religion is rather a different matter. I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

“That is why I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are, a great liberation of thought. The whole thing started with the theory of relativity. In the past, the statement that two events are simultaneous was considered an objective assertion, one that could be communicated quite simply and that was open to verification by any observer. Today we know that ‘simultaneity’ contains a subjective element, inasmuch as two events that appear simultaneous to an observer at rest are not necessarily simultaneous to an observer in motion. However, the relativistic description is also objective inasmuch as every observer can deduce by calculation what the other observer will perceive or has perceived. For all that, we have come a long way from the classical ideal of objective descriptions.

“In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts. For instance, we can say that a photographic plate has been blackened, or that cloud droplets have formed. But we can say nothing about the atoms themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features.

The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality. Admittedly, even in our future encounters with reality we shall have to distinguish between the objective and the subjective side, to make a division between the two. But the location of the separation may depend on the way things are looked at; to a certain extent it can be chosen at will. Hence I can quite understand why we cannot speak about the content of religion in an objectifying language. The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man’s relationship with the central order.”

“If you distinguish so sharply between the languages of religion, science, and art,” I asked, “what meaning do you attach to such apodictic statements as ‘There is a living God’ or ‘There is an immortal soul’? What is the meaning of ‘there is’ in this type of language? Science, like Dirac, objects to such formulations. Let me illustrate the epistemological side of the problem by means of the following analogy:

“Mathematicians, as everyone knows, work with an imaginary unit, the square root of ?1, called i. We know that i does not figure among the natural numbers. Nevertheless, important branches of mathematics, for instance the theory of analytical functions, are based on this imaginary unit, that is, on the fact that -1 exists after all. Would you agree that the statement ‘There is a -1’ means nothing else than ‘There are important mathematical relations that are most simply represented by the introduction of the -1 concept’? And yet these relations would exist even without it. That is precisely why this type of mathematics is so useful even in science and technology. What is decisive, for instance, in the theory of functions, is the existence of important mathematical laws governing the behavior of pairs of continuous variables.

These relations are rendered more comprehensible by the introduction of the abstract concept of -1, although that concept is not basically needed for our understanding, and although it has no counterpart among the natural numbers. An equally abstract concept is that of infinity, which also plays a very important role in modern mathematics. It, too, has no correlate, and moreover raises grave problems. In short, mathematics introduces ever higher stages of abstraction that help us attain a coherent grasp of ever wider realms. To get back to our original question, is it correct to look upon the religious ‘there is’ as just another, though different, attempt to reach ever higher levels of abstraction? An attempt to facilitate our understanding of universal connections? After all, the connections themselves are real enough, no matter into what spiritual forms we try to fit them.”

“With respect to the epistemological side of the problem, your comparison may pass,” Bohr replied. “But in other respects it is quite inadequate. In mathematics we can take our inner distance from the content of our statements. In the final analysis mathematics is a mental game that we can play or not play as we choose. Religion, on the other hand, deals with ourselves, with our life and death; its promises are meant to govern our actions and thus, at least indirectly, our very existence. We cannot just look at them impassively from the outside. Moreover, our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society. Even if religion arose as the spiritual structure of a particular human society, it is arguable whether it has remained the strongest social molding force through history, or whether society, once formed, develops new spiritual structures and adapts them to its particular level of knowledge.

Nowadays, the individual seems to be able to choose the spiritual framework of his thoughts and actions quite freely, and this freedom reflects the fact that the boundaries between the various cultures and societies are beginning to become more fluid. But even when an individual tries to attain the greatest possible degree of independence, he will still be swayed by the existing spiritual structures?consciously or unconsciously. For he, too, must be able to speak of life and death and the human condition to other members of the society in which he’s chosen to live; he must educate his children according to the norms of that society, fit into its life. Epistemological sophistries cannot possibly help him attain these ends.

Here, too, the relationship between critical thought about the spiritual content of a given religion and action based on the deliberate acceptance of that content is complementary. And such acceptance, if consciously arrived at, fills the individual with strength of purpose, helps him to overcome doubts and, if he has to suffer, provides him with the kind of solace that only a sense of being sheltered under an all-embracing roof can grant. In that sense, religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set.”

“You keep referring to the individual’s free choice,” I said, “and you compare it with the freedom with which the atomic physicist can arrange his experiments in this way or that. Now the classical physicist had no such freedom. Does that mean that the special features of modern physics have a more direct bearing on the problem of the freedom of the will? As you know, the fact that atomic processes cannot be fully determined is often used as an argument in favor of free will and divine intervention.”

“I am convinced that this whole attitude is based on a simple misunderstanding, or rather on the confusion of questions, which, as far as I can see, impinge on distinct though complementary ways of looking at things. If we speak of free will, we refer to a situation in which we have to make decisions. This situation and the one in which we analyze the motives of our actions or even the one in which we study physiological processes, for instance the electrochemical processes in our brain, are mutually exclusive. In other words, they are complementary, so that the question whether natural laws determine events completely or only statistically has no direct bearing on the question of free will. Naturally, our different ways of looking at things must fit together in the long run, i.e., we must be able to recognize them as noncontradictory parts of the same reality, though we cannot yet tell precisely how.

When we speak of divine intervention, we quite obviously do not refer to the scientific determination of an event, but to the meaningful connection between this event and others or human thought. Now this intellectual connection is as much a part of reality as scientific causality; it would be much too crude a simplification if we ascribed it exclusively to the subjective side of reality. Once again we can learn from the analogous situation in natural science. There are well-known biological relations that we do not describe causally, but rather finalistically, that is, with respect of their ends. We have only to think of the healing process in an injured organism. The finalistic interpretation has a characteristically complementary relationship to the one based on physico-chemical or atomic laws; that is, in the one case we ask whether the process leads to the desired end, the restoration of normal conditions in the organism; in the other case we ask about the causal chain determining the molecular processes.

The two descriptions are mutually exclusive, but not necessarily contradictory. We have good reason to assume that quantum-mechanical laws can be proved valid in a living organism just as they can in dead matter. For all that, a finalistic description is just as valid. I believe that if the development of atomic physics has taught us anything, it is that we must learn to think more subtly than in the past.”

“We always come back to the epistemological side of religion,” I objected. “But Dirac’s attack on religion was aimed chiefly at its ethical side. Dirac disapproves quite particularly of the dishonesty and self-deception that are far too often coupled to religious thought. But in his abhorrence he has become a fanatic defender of rationalism, and I have the feeling that rationalism is not enough.”

“I think Dirac did well,” Niels said, “to warn you so forcefully against the dangers of self-deception and inner contradictions; but Wolfgang was equally right when he jokingly drew Dirac’s attention to the extraordinary difficulty of escaping this danger entirely.” Niels closed the conversation with one of those stories he liked to tell on such occasions: “One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the door to his house. When a mutual acquaintance asked him, ‘But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he replied, ‘Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don’t believe it.'”