(Hindu) Polytheism is revived in the light of scientific investigation

Since the Middle Age when semitic monotheistic religions expanded throughout the known world and the Renaissance when they conquered much of the newly ‘discovered’ lands in Africa and the Americas, religions defined as “polytheistic”, “animistic”  or in other words, non-revealed and non-prophetic, have been either on the decline or at least under intellectual and social attack on grounds that they worship “false” gods, are based on myth (understood as imaginary) and are “unscientific” because the personalities they invoke are invisible and their claims cannot be proven by methods of observation and testing required for scientific validity.

While materialistic “skeptical” scientists dismiss a priori all religions as being unfounded in reason and observation, their colleagues who remain believers in one of the monotheistic faiths argue that although religion stands above science, the existence of one true God, as revealed in the Bible, the Gospels and in the Quran is undeniable or at least admissible and may in fact be proven by the study of nature and its laws or even some day by direct observation. 

Those scientists however usually reject the validity of “pagan” religions which they hold to belong to primitive times and to have been superseded long ago by the manifestation of the one true God to his chosen prophets and peoples according to Jews and Muslims and also through the coming of his only Son, in the eyes of Christians.

Scientific research has made gigantic strides in the last century and the picture of the universe it is uncovering is vastly different from the notions harboured or conceived by the intellectual luminaries of the “age of reason” who generally thought that science was an accurate and definitive body of knowledge replacing the immature speculations and beliefs of darker eras. Nowadays many findings open radically new vistas into the structure of reality and the nature of life and consciousness.

A single sentence in a special issue of the Economist of January 5, 2002 sums up the current conclusion:

Given that the universe actually consists of nothing at all (in the Linde Vilenkin model), explaining its existence becomes rather easier. The separation of the nothing into energy and gravity is a result of the uncertainty principle.

The usual explanation provided in the modern age for the so-called polytheistic religions and mythologies is that gods were invented in primitive cultures in order to explain and personalize natural forces and creatures, such as fire, water, thunder, vegetation and the animal kingdom, or that they are in fact psychological allegories used to represent the powers of the mind and of the subconscious. Deities and spirits are symbols used to create shared frames of meaning in the language of Symbolic Interaction Theory. Even educated followers of polytheistic religions tend to rationalize them in the language of twentieth century science and psycho-analysis (Freudian or Jungian). Newer disciplines such as parapsychology and sophrology however provide a different perspective on the origin and essence of the religious phenomenon or ‘tropism’.

In general the scientific vision that has emerged gradually in the decades following the development of relativistic and quantum theories reveals that the universe is far more complex and mysterious than what our senses and experimental methods perceive or can even imagine.

To use a common image, we are only skimming the surface of an unfathomable ocean of existence and life. In the astronomical context this fact is made manifest by the discovery that visible matter and energy represent only about 4% of the “substance” of the cosmos while the remaining 96% is so far undefined and imperceptible except through deduction from current interpretations of the General Theory of Relativity (GRT). One consequence of the uncertainty principle is that empty space is far from empty. It could instead be called Aether or Akash as an allusion to the ancient cosmologies.

Those current interpretations also compel us to admit that, apart from the fact that our own space-time SHOULD have eleven to twenty six dimensions, according to various prevalent physical theories (in String M-Theory “branes” exist in the 11th dimension which accounts for gravity), of which we only perceive four (including the apparent flow of time), the universe is a multi-verse in which an unknown number of bubble universes co-exist and occasionally collide or intersect. Entire universes can appear as quantum fluctuations. String Theory implies that six extra-dimensions are tightly knotted at every point in the fabric of the 4-D reality and deduces that there are 100 to the power of 500 different ways for these dimensions to be knotted, hence as many universes (Bousso & Polchanski).

The word ‘dimension’ implies di-mens which means mentally dividing space-time as when we discern two perpendicular axes on a flat surface to grasp length and breadth or when we separate the past from the future.

We exist as separate psycho-physical beings on a particular M-Brane of the multiverse but there are many reasons to accept the possibility that beings and things from outside do cross into this M-Brane from other space-times, whether through wormholes or other channels or tunnels, and thereby expand even further the newly popular theory of panspermia which sees life travelling in many forms and vehicles across space in the universe and cross-fertilizing planets, like insects and winds spread vegetable pollens around the earth.

The Interface Model (Hoffman, Singh, Prakash,  2015) shows that our minds apprehend only “icons” of things which are logically indescribable and even unimaginable in their total reality while the causal powers behind them  are hidden from us. Therefore the awareness of usually invisible super-human conscious entities that may be regarded as divine (i.e. luminous),  angelic (aethereal) or demonic (in the originally ambivalent meaning of the word)  is not only logically acceptable, it is in fact an inevitable corollary of the most up to date Cosmology Theory. 

According to cosmologist Lee Smolin, the laws of physics are the equivalent of the DNA programming in the genes of a living organism. Each universe is then a cosmic ecosystem probably regulated by different laws or habits like a living being or rather a hive of life-forms whose multiplicity, diversity and independence account for the free, unconditioned and erratic nature of the whole. Smolin and other physicists are building an anthropomorphic, non-linear physics amounting to a new natural philosophy rather than mechanical science.

Contrary to the famous Fermi paradox which stated in the middle of the last century that there should be many other advanced life forms in the universe but that they were bizarrely nowhere to be seen, the most reasonable current admission is that “we actually belong to a larger civilization but are not (all) aware of that fact”, although it is suggested by hundreds of thousands of observations all over the world and by many scientific investigations effected since more than eight decades in several countries.

Much more information is contained in the hundreds of documents declassified by the governments of the US, Canada, Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Australia and several other countries, including recent releases by the CIA (January 2017). Some detailed testimonies and records can be consulted online at sites such as MUFON, CUFOS, NUFORC, the Disclosure Project, the Paradigm Research Group, the (Laurance) Rockefeller Initiative, the Earthfiles, the Exopolitics website, the French Cometa Report of the GEIPAN-SIPRA et al.

Technology either follows or precedes scientific theory by means of its increasing powers of observation and action. The ‘Santilli’ concave telescope enables us to detect and even photograph self-propelled, apparently intelligent entities, some luminous and others dark (devas and asuras?), both in space and in the earthly atmosphere which may well be defined as subtle lifeforms lying beyond ordinary human perception.

That is one of many discoveries, - including the detection of neutrinos raining ceaselessly across space - which indicate that the materialistic theory of a purely physical, inanimate and mechanical universe conceived in the western ‘age of enlightenment’ by skeptical rationalists such as d’Alembert, d’Holbach and Laplace was a self-limiting agnostic regression in reaction to the overbearing power of the Church and the ‘tyrannical” States it supported in Europe.

It was a politically inspired revolt against the ‘oppression of transcendence’ but it is now as outdated as the ideologies of many 19th and 20th century socialist, positivist and marxist socio-political thinkers, who argued that all human affairs must be regulated solely according to the laws of (classical) mathematics, (Newtonian) physics and mechanical engineering in the absence of any spiritual vision.

Emerging knowledge in biology strengthens the long standing evolutionary assumption that humans, like all other species are “galactic dust” going through a continuing process of transition across a succession of psycho-physical states as the indic (vedic, jain and buddhist) doctrines of transmigration through karma explain. It is almost inevitable to admit that other beings have already transited to other relatively “higher”, “more complex” or “subtler” levels of existence which are as hard to conceive of for us as the thought of a mathematician or a software designer may be for a hen or an ant. Do we expect a bird to understand the technical plans of a rocket scientist?

The perception of gods and goddesses as well as other ‘supernatural’ beings called by many names in diverse cultures, seems to derive from the recognition of this process and while there is no scientific proof for a supreme All Father or Mother God managing from above or outside the universe he or she created, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence and a wealth of testimonies for the reality of beings far more powerful, long lived and mentally developed than homo sapiens, intervening in this world of ours and influencing our behaviour in many ways, visible or not.

‘Sacred’ and mythological texts from all continents almost without exception allude to, describe and invoke such beings and regard some of them as our creators. From Francis Crick, discoverer of the DNA, who believed that it was artificially engineered by designers from another world, to a growing number of scientists and technological pioneers who argue that we live in a “computer-simulation” like the Matrix of the homonymous Hollywood blockbuster, a consensus is emerging that the universe and the “phenomena” of life and “sentience” are one and the same and that innumerable conscious and intelligent entities inhabit it within and around us.

What we are now taught to regard as elements or states of matter such as fire or water can equally be defined as living creatures of a different order than the “solid” organisms which we identify as such. Physical, chemical and crystallographic characteristics of water for instance can be rationally ascribed to biotic features of a collective entity which behaves as a cluster of “nested holons” (such as a beehive) in the language of bio-chemistry, whether it is in a drop, a cloud, a puddle, a river or an ocean.

In the pan-biotic optics, all aspects of nature, such as flames, winds, stars and planets, including our mother earth, can be seen as animic identities, not only as a poetic metaphor or spiritual anagogy, but also in the “new science of life” (Sheldrake) as a taxonomic definition that biologists from the Santiago School and others have pioneered according to a systems theory of nature.

Western classical science developed from the 17th century onwards by rejecting the theological precept about the pervasiveness of life as the “breath of God”. Instead it defined life as a peculiar and anomalistic feature of the vegetal and animal kingdom born by chance or design into a mechanical, mineral and fiery universe.  

Intelligence was seen as an even more exceptional epiphenomenon, fully developed in Man and only perceptible as a faint glimmer in animals which were believed to be ruled by instinct. This cosmology was convenient for a civilization focused on the exploitation of its environment and of all beings and things within it. “Machine-like” animals were suitable for exploitation, consumption or extermination while among humans, “inferior races” could also be held in slavery or killed for the benefit of the superior Christian European society whose intelligence was alleged to be fully developed.

We have now come full circle and are rediscovering an organic, pan-psychic universe in which visible and invisible beings at all levels interact and appear under various forms as they shift across dimensions from the subtle to the relatively denser levels of manifestation: every element of the physical world has a trans-physical or deep dimension. (Furlinger, 2016)

As astrophysicist James Jeans presciently concluded, the world is not a great machine but rather a great thought, populated by dreams of variable solidity and persistence. Sri Krsna described it even better to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Astrophysicists and cosmologists have been called the modern myth makers (The Economist, ibid.). Myths cannot be built without gods and perennial philosophers know that, as Plato highlighted, myths are more real than the superficial appearances we can observe.