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Until recently, when the eastern religions began to have a greater impact upon our culture, much of our self-definition (largely unconscious) was based on the physics of a few hundred years ago. What I am referring to here is our insistence on seeing ourselves as solid objects. This definition of the universe, as made up of solid objects, was held largely by Isaac Newton and his colleagues in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Newtonian physics was extended in the 19th century to describe a universe composed of fundamental building blocks called atoms. These Newtonian atoms were thought of as composed of solid objects-a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons revolving around the nucleus much like the earth traveling around the sun. Newtonian mechanics successfully described the motions of the planets, mechanical machines, and fluids in continuous motion. The enormous success of the mechanistic model made physicists of the early 19th century believe that the universe was indeed a huge mechanical system running according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These laws were seen as the basic laws of nature, and Newtonian mechanics was considered to the ultimate theory of natural phenomena. These laws held firm the ideas of absolute time and space and the physical phenomena as strictly causal in nature. Everything could be described objectively. All physical reactions were seen to have a physical cause, like balls colliding on a pool table. Energy-matter interactions, such as a radio playing music in response to invisible radiowaves, were not yet known. Nor did it occur to anyone that the experimenter himself affects the experimental results not only in psychological experiments but also in physical ones as well, as physicists have now proven. This view was very comforting and still is to those of us who prefer to see the world as solid and largely unchanging, with very clear, definite sets of rules that govern its functioning. Much of our daily lives still run on Newtonian mechanics. Except for the electrical systems, our homes are largely Newtonian. We experience our bodies in a mechanical way. We define most of our experience in terms of absolute, three dimensional space and linear time. We all have clocks. We need them to continue our lives as we have structured them-mostly linearly. As we rush about our daily lives, in an effort to be "on time," it is easy to see ourselves as mechanical and to lose sight of the deeper human experience within. As anyone what the universe is made of, and he or she will most likely describe the Newtonian model of the atom (electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and neutrons). However, if taken to its literal extension, this theory puts us in the rather disconcerting position of thinking of ourselves as being composed of itsy-bitsy Ping Pong balls whirling around each other. |
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