The Unity Principle

We need to start a revolution.  Not a revolution against any national figure or political state, but a revolution against a philosophical viewpoint, the viewpoint of modern scientific materialism and reductionism.  This world view, born back in the ancient depths of Greek philosophy with the Atomists and carried forward by Bacon, Newton, and Einstein, has been advanced by modern science as far as it can go in our understanding of the universe and it now holds us back.  Further progress requires throwing away the very idea that the Universe can be understood by reducing it to its ultimate constituents and understanding those parts separately.  Even science itself is slowly reaching this conclusion with recent advances in quantum mechanics such as Bell’s Theorem and string theory and our understanding of the concepts of non-locality and quantum entanglement.  What new conceptual framework or idea should replace this outdated reductionist understanding of the way the world works?  I would propose that it be The Unity Principle.

In his book “The Unity Principle: The Link Between Science and Spirituality”, Steven Richheimer boils this idea down to the simple statement that “The undivided wholeness of the created universe is essentially what we call the Unity Principle…Unlike the philosophy of dualism, which teaches that the universe consists of, or is explicable as two or more fundamental entities, such as matter and mind, living and nonliving, God and creation, etc., monism purports that the universe is a Singularity (One).  Everything is connected, and all things originate from Supreme Consciousness.”  Also known as monism, holism, and monotheistic panentheism, the Unity Principle provides an explanation of how the Universe is created from Consciousness.  The exciting part is that these types of ideas, heretofore completely of a religious, mystical, or spiritual nature and thus not amenable to precise definition or analysis, can now at least partially be based on cold, hard science, namely quantum mechanics, cosmology, and string theory.

Quantum mechanics is the most tested and best verified scientific theory in human history.  What most physicists now accept, I think, is that quantum mechanics shows us that the quantum world is nonlocal, both in space and in time.  Spatial nonlocality means that the properties of elementary particles cannot be specified solely with reference to properties or measurements existing in an entirely local, limited framework, cut off from the rest of the Universe.  Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.”  Temporal nonlocality means that time does not flow linearly from the past, through the present, inexorably on to the future.  This implies that effect can sometimes precede cause, or more precisely, that our normal localized conception of the cause-effect relationship is only a limited subset or part of the entire concept, just what we can piece together from our local and very limited observations.  The most exciting future developments in physics over the next century will be those that illuminate how this property of nonlocality manifests itself in our ordinary, everyday macroscopic world.

Richheimer elucidates these ideas in the following passage:

“Our current understanding of the origin of the universe suggests that it began as a single point or singularity containing all the mass-energy of the universe and has been evolving since the Big Bang.  But since all quanta interact with one another or are entangled, they can be thought of as being merely parts of a quantum singularity, parts of a Whole.  Nonlocality in the quantum realm implies that by nature the universe is nonlocal or best understood as an indivisible whole.  Hence, modern physics proclaims that the constituents of matter-energy and all phenomena involving them are intimately connected and interdependent and can best be understood as parts of a Whole, which includes the consciousness or mind of the observer.  Accordingly the discreetness or individuality we observe in the objective universe can be considered a macroscopic illusion—all things are actual inseparable parts of the One.”

When we throw out the prevailing ideas of scientific reductionism and materialism and replace them with the Unity Principle, all kinds of things begin to fall into place.  If we look at the Universe as a single entity and all of the separateness we think we see around us as a macroscopic illusion, all kinds of parapsychological phenomena become at least potentially understandable.  If we take seriously that part of string theory that says that what we think of as four dimensional space-time really has at least six additional dimensions (and perhaps many more), those extra and for now unknown dimensions could provide an explanation and physical mechanism for quantum entanglement, faster-than-light communication, and provide the physical underpinnings for the Unity Principle.  If Unity is your starting point, that Unity can be expressed in physics by quantum mechanics and bosonic communications, expressed in biology by the purposeful direction of evolutionary systems towards ever greater complexity, expressed in psychology by what is sometimes called the "collective unconsciousness", and is expressed on a higher level by what are called spiritual phenomena, which are really just instances of the experience of Unity without having a scientific explanation for the experience.

In the realm of spirituality, the Unity Principle could explain a lot of so-called spiritual phenomena because almost all of them, I think, could be understood as a person’s direct experience of the Unity of the Universe, that Undivided Whole, and then trying to make sense of it based on their own conceptual framework.  Note that I said experience and not knowledge, for it is at bottom just that.  The great mystics of the world have always had a problem with putting their experiences into words because the very act of doing so particularizes them and robs them of the immediacy and universality that made it a mystical experience in the first place.  Some things cannot be known, they can only be experienced. 

My own personal belief is that we all came from the Original Oneness and to it we all will return.  Our spiritual nature participates in that Oneness, but experiences it from the limited viewpoint of Individuality.  Our spiritual advancement, I think, is the road from Oneness to Separateness and back to the original Oneness. This is a journey that probably takes many lifetimes as there are many lessons to be learned. It is at bottom a theosophical viewpoint.

So if we want to start that revolution, what should the first step be?  I would posit that it just be the realization that the current tired and worn out reductionist conceptual framework will not work in the New Age of nonlocal quantum mechanics and string theory, and then joining a full and honest exploration of what new frameworks and ideas may be obtained by starting with the principle that the Universe is a single entity and that in order to understand it, we have to start with that one simple fundamental proposition.