The Atom Smasher’s Dreamcatcher
Excerpt from Chapter 51 of The Journey Across Forever by Wayne Saalman
THE EVOLUTION OF REVELATION must lead, at last, to a synthesis of science and spirituality, to an understanding of the world in which the views of mystics and physicists prove complementary as explanatory models of reality, rather than as views based on paradigms which can never be brought together in any form of harmonious unity.
Upon recently re-reading The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, I found many of the illustrations of subatomic particles in the book quite captivating once more. Having been set loose in a collider, the particles are shown spinning off in various ways, including in elegant spirals that reminded me of the spirals carved into rock at Newgrange, the Neolithic monument which stands on a prominence near the River Boyne in County Meath here in Ireland where I am now living. No one is sure who built the megalithic edifice, but the entrance stones and the kerbstones are full of engraved spirals and every year at the winter solstice the sun’s rays illuminate the monument’s innermost chamber and the spirals within it, I am told, seem almost to come alive.
It would appear that whoever built the prehistoric monument — dated to around 3200 BCE and thought by archaeologists to be older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt — had a deep understanding of both the innermost forces which animate life as we know it and the astronomical forces at play in the greater cosmos. Researchers are simply unsure, therefore, if Newgrange has religious significance as a place of worship for a so-called “cult of the dead” or if it is a strictly scientifically based product of people possessing advanced levels of astronomical knowledge, a group that chose to concretize its knowledge in stone, apparently for the benefit of future generations.
Physicists, as we know, seek to discover material essences to the physical realm and what that requires is breaking matter down into smaller and smaller units. To achieve that end, the scientific community has built high-energy particle colliders which can split the atom. The largest of these facilities is the Large Hadron Collider built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose headquarters are located in Meyrin in the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland.
What colliders do is accelerate particles to a very high kinetic form of energy and pit two streams of directed beams of energy against each other by sending those beams rushing in opposite directions around the circular collider. As the particles ride the beams, they attain greater and greater speeds along the way. Finally, when the two beams meet, they smash into each other head on. What is then captured by computerized sensors are the subatomic by-products of these collisions and physicists study these by-products in an effort to understand the laws of nature which govern quantum mechanics.
What prompted me to re-read The Tao of Physics was a dream I had that contained something like two powerful beams of energy colliding, complete with an explosion; one that stunned me.
What stunned me even further in the dream was seeing a Native American, whom I took to be a shaman, holding a dreamcatcher and leaping to my aid as if to protect me from the flying debris that was set loose by the blast.
Dreamcatchers are handmade willow hoops with leather nets stretched across them and are usually decorated with feathers and beads. The webbing is meant to capture negative energies which can assail someone in the night as the person sleeps and dreams. Most westerners, however, tend to see dreamcatchers more as magical charms for bringing one’s highest and best dreams to fruition. Either way, dreams are held to be sacred by Native American wisdom masters, for they are believed to be emanations from the realm of the Great Spirit.
Neuroscientists, in contrast, have no idea how or why we humans dream at night, but they do know that dreams are vital to our cognitive functioning and, indeed, to our very survival.
The Hermetic metaphysician links dreams to the spiritual realm in the same way as Native American and Eastern wisdom masters and I can personally attest that some of my most profound insights into the nature of consciousness and the essence of life has come from dreams. Precognitive dreams have been especially telling in my view as they offer a form of paranormal insight into the nature of time and reality which is inexplicable in materialist terms.
How, we must ask, can the mind possibly see an event before it has occurred? In my experience, precognitive dreams can be quite vivid; so much so that when the event perceived actualizes in the “real world” it is unmistakeable. In such a dream a very exact activity occurs or a specific person appears, perhaps someone that one has never met, or someone whom one has not seen in a very long time. In either case, when the event comes to pass, it can prove quite jolting, but also reassuring. It tells us that time is not the absolute we generally believe it is. Nor is reality the solid thing we think it is. As Gary Zukav put it in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: “Our experience tells us that the physical world is solid, real, and independent of us. Quantum mechanics says, simply, this is not so.”
The Vedic and Buddhist sages understood thousands of years ago that the world we experience is “maya’, it is founded on real phenomena, but what we make of that raw sensory data is an illusory narrative that has no reality other than the one which the human mind chooses to make of it. Likewise, when physicists send two high-energy beams of particles smashing into each other and then deciphering the result of the subsequent explosion, that is maya, as well. What the sensors and computer images give us is a momentary snapshot of forces which, in essence, are inexplicable in ultimate terms. These images are the stuff of dreams. These computers, metaphorically speaking, are like dreamcatchers operating on a whole higher level.
