Yoga — Discovering the God Particle
By Alexis Beddoe
(The layout has been changed to suit web publishing)
The magnificent box of tricks at CERN on the Swiss French border is a huge tunnel,
some 27km in circumference, with extraordinary machinery inside that is engineered
to accelerate particles towards the speed of light and collide them into each other
In approaching the absolute and mimicking the big bang, the scientists hope to create
what is referred to as the God particle: a key ingredient, if not the key ingredient
to establishing the Grand Unified Theory and discovering the Ultimate Laws of Nature.
To that end, science has arrived at the following situation and conclusions: Quantum
mechanics deals with teeny weeny things (sub-atomic particles), relativity deals
with great big whopping things (out there in the universe). Curiously, everything
obeys both sets of laws, but the laws themselves flatly contradict each other So
the Ultimate Laws of Nature, in order to be unearthed, must find reconciliation between
quantum mechanics and relativity. And this is where yoga swings into action.
We all, quite naturally, at times experience a sense of big self — of all in one,
and at other times of little self of one in many. Yet within this big and little
self, there resides an absolute self, an ‘I am’, that acts as the indissoluble marriage
of big and little. Now hark at Patanjali’s Sutra 1.40, ‘The sovereignty of the mind
that is settled, extends from the smallest of the small to the greatest of the great’
This has to be a description of that unmoving and ever-present self which resides
in all sizes of self from small to big. One might even venture to describe that self
as the reconciliation between the quantum mechanical self and the relative self;
i.e. the self that is the Ultimate Laws of Nature, the Grand Unified Truth.
The Baghavad Gita chips in too. Krishna says to Arjuna, in Ch. IX, The Yoga of Mysticism,
‘I lie under the seen, of all creatures the seed that is changeless Arjuna, I am
the cosmos revealed, and its germ that lies hidden.’ Those latter words can surely,
without controversy, be translated to ‘I am the Ultimate Laws of Nature discovered,
and the God particle within’. And as science nears that God particle and those laws
that are stubbornly held as objective entities (and this despite science itself having
learnt that there is no such thing objective observation), these celebrated and much
used words of St Paul in Corinthinans 1.13 roundly concur with those of Krishna and
offers the other, nonobjective view: ‘Now we see through a glass darkly but then
face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall? know even as also lam known.’ Indeed,
for the sake of the much promised and aspired to liberation of man, these words of
the predominant teacher of the West must surely likewise be destined to be internalised:
‘I am the Truth and the light’. Referring this statement once again to the marriage
of big and small, the only thing which resides in everything from big to small must
be that which is bigger than the biggest and smaller than the smallest. That, of
course, is nothing; for nothing cannot be bigger or smaller than itself. And what
is nothing if not the void? And did not the Buddha assuredly direct us towards ‘The
clear light of the void’.
So while science’s objective search for the God particle is rather like story of
Hansel and Gretel tracking their way home, yoga, in being ‘..a settling of the mind
into silence’ (Sutra 1 .2), might be considered as nothing other than an exercise
that allows a self-reflection of that Tat Tvam Asi God particle.
Given that science and religion seem to be converging on the truth, and given that
the truth can but rudely expose any falsehoods in either camp, the only question
any self should make, a question that can only be posed to the self in self- reflection,
is this: Am I ready to bear the Truth? Almost needless to say, if the endeavour to
self-reflect is true, the question answers itself. Tat Tvam Asi.
What fascinating and exciting times in which we live.
