“Reality has a physical and as a metaphysical aspect.” This statement is the epitome of David Bohm’s findings endorsed by his research in frontier physics. Bohm argued that at the implicate level, all knowledge of the universe is stored as pure potentiality in a state of “dynamic vacuum,” (“the infinite inner possibilities of the infinity of the Ultimate Ego in Iqbal’s formulation1 and “immutable entities” of Ibn ‘Arabī2) and at that level, where there are no observable phenomena, reality is entirely non-local and non-temporal. His theories had deeper ramifications for religion and philosophy, an unexpected ally in the fight against dogmatic, scientistic, materialism. Modernism, with its view that humankind can only know what science can prove, held sway in academic circles for nearly a century, was shown by Bohm to have been antiquated view. Bohm was arguing that there is a facet of reality that science cannot see. The best understanding of the universe necessitated the acceptance of the view that reality has a metaphysical aspect, an aspect that by definition could never be directly quantified or measured, though its effects in the realm of time and space could be. And this is precisely what Iqbal had proposed to detail in his 2nd Lecture with reference to the Qur’anic verse “He is the First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Al-Ākhir) and the Outward (Al-Ẓāhir) and the Inward (Al-Bāṭin).

Its boundlessness is potential, not actual. Intensive intensity

40/7مضمر ممکنا ت

یں ہتو ا اسیر مکاں! المکاں س دور ن ے ہو جلوے ہیں ہگا تر خاک داں س دور ن ے ے ہ

یں جس میں ہو مرغزار ک بیم خزاں ن ہ و کہ ہغمیں ن ہ ہیں ہتر آشیاں س دور ن ے ے

ہی خالص علم قلندری ک حیات ہ ہے ہےخدنگ جست ہ ہیں ہلیکن کماں س دور ن ے

Iqbal***

آاتش بندہ اند آاب و خاک و باد و

با من و تو مردہ ، با حق زندہ اند***

ییف بے قیاس ل# بے تک یتصا ال& ناس یب الناس را با جا ہست ر

There is a relation, without being able to ask how, without being able to compare it to anything,

Between the soul of man and the Lord of the soul.

PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS Some Remarks on Iqbal’s Model of the Ultimate

Reality with Reference to David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“Reality has a physical and as a metaphysical aspect.” This statement could be safely considered as the epitome of David Bohm’s

findings endorsed by his research in frontier physics that spanned well over five decades. David Bohm, physicist and close colleague of both Oppenheimer and Einstein, was a theorist whose work was an advance on Einstein’s theory and greatly impacted the scientific worldview, opening new vistas that led towards a viable model for a splice between science and religion. Bohm was making such interesting claims about the nature of reality one couldn’t think of anyone whose theories had deeper ramifications for religion and philosophy, an unexpected ally in the fight against dogmatic, scientistic, materialism that had prevailed in the

academy and was responsible for the colonizing effects of science on humanities.3

Iqbal was the sage who, while reformulating the classical perspective of the Islamic tradition on the nature of reality, both in his prose and poetry,

Bohm’s views, developed through his laboratory experiments spanned over a period of thirty years, supported the theory that the universe has a metaphysical aspect; in fact, Bohm described a transcendent level of reality that sounded almost identical– if not identical– to Eckhart’s and Aldous Huxley’s Divine Ground of Being, as well as Hinduism’s Brahma4 and, to our astonishment, to the Iqbalian “…..the ultimate ground of all experience” 5 the Immanent-Infinite (Iqbal’s Model of the Ultimate Reality). We would have occasion to say more about it later but let us first have a look at what Bohm had to say about the matter.

Bohm published his landmark book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980, in which he presented a distillation of a theory he had been working on for more than thirty years. He had been nudged toward his revolutionary views by the unusual behavior of quantum entities called photons. In brief, the aspect that intrigued Bohm was this: if two related photons of light (related because they result from the splitting of the same positron, which is a larger quantum entity) are traveling in opposite directions, they somehow maintain the same angles of polarization (basically, the same orientation in space relative to their point of origin) no matter how far apart they travel in space, or even if one of them is affected by an outside force along the way. For example, if a scientist changes the orientation of one of the photons, the other one will instantaneously be found to have the same new angle of polarization.

This phenomenon was proven conclusively by experiment two years later, in 1982, at the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris. It had already been accepted as most likely even at the beginning of Bohm’s career, and what drew Bohm’s attention– and everyone else’s– was that it seemed to present a contradiction to Einstein’s theory that nothing could

travel faster than the speed of light. This business about one photon changing its orientation in summary with another seemed to suggest a sort of instantaneous communication between two distant objects. Instantaneous occurs outside the realm of speed altogether, let alone faster than the speed of light. For Bohm, who agreed with Einstein that nothing was likely to break light speed, this phenomenon of the ‘communicating’ photons suggested that quantum theory must somehow be incomplete, that perhaps a better theory could resolve or explain away what appeared to be a contradiction from inside the current view.6 Maybe nothing could travel faster than light but instantaneous communication is somehow also possible.

Bohm began to draft a new and broader perspective, and after more than two decades finally arrived at his theory, arguing that quantum reality is actually based on what he termed an “implicate order.” His view was that there is a fundamental but unobservable level of order in the universe that gives rise to all observable phenomena, including not only light photons but, at higher magnitudes of reality, children, trees and inanimate matter. The underlying level, which he termed the “enfolded order” (synonymous with what others have termed the “quantum potential”), sometimes “unfolds” into discrete quantum moments of physical being. However, Bohm believed that on the “enfolded” level, where nothing is manifest as an observable entity, all things are really part of one thing– though this thing is not a thing at all,7 at least not in the Newtonian sense. Bohm described it as an “implicate order” that underlies the “explicate order” of the physical universe. He theorized that as various quanta emerge from it, they retain some characteristics of their implicate– and infinitely interconnected– original state. The beauty of this theory for the problem of those pesky photons that seem to instantaneously communicate with each other was that it allowed for the photons to exist as discrete particles on one level of their being (as they moved away from each other in the explicit order) but explained how they could also change

their orientation simultaneously. On the explicit level, the photons were in cahoots simply because they still retained characteristics of the implicate level from which they had emerged; they were not communicating across a vast distance at a speed greater than light; they were simply behaving as the one thing they fundamentally were on the implicate level of existence.

This summary is a redacted explanation of Bohm’s theory in Wholeness and the Implicate Order and intended to illustrate the components of Bohm’s work that are in sync with Iqbal’s views that he expounded with reference to the Qur’anic verse “He is the First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Al-Ākhir) and the Outward (Al-Ẓāhir) and the Inward (Al-Bāṭin).8 First and foremost, it contains the premise that there is a level of things that transcends physical reality and this level of quantum potentiality not only exists but is the foundation for all existence, a view which sounds very much like the doctrines mentioned above from Vedanta, Christian Theology and Iqbal. Though its presence of the implicate order is strongly suggested by the behavior of quantum entities like split photons, it cannot, because of its implicit and unmanifest nature, be quantified directly by scientific methods, since there is nothing to ‘see’ with the tools of science. This concept also jibes with the claims of mystics, (in Iqbal’s words: “religious experts in all ages and countries is that there are potential types of consciousness lying close to our normal consciousness.” 9) who had written that the purest level of Being exists beyond both time and space.

If one tries to fathom more deeply into Bohm’s view of Reality, the points of resonance with the traditional/religious views keep mounting. For example, Bohm’s theory supported and expressed the notion that the universe, at least at its quantum level, is non-local, meaning, in the jargon of physics,10 that the events and entities we encounter in the explicate order are not ultimately autonomous or disconnected. Bohm argued that at the implicate level, all knowledge of the universe is stored as pure potentiality in a state of “dynamic vacuum,” (“the infinite inner possibilities of the infinity of the Ultimate Ego in Iqbal’s formulation11

and “immutable entities” of Ibn ‘Arabī12) and at that level, where there are no observable phenomena, reality is entirely non-local and non-temporal. On that enfolded level, it is Oneness– or None-ness’ (since it’s difficult to speak of a singularity from which nothing can be separate, including a place from which to observe its oneness)– that then unfolds into physical patterns and events. The closer we get to the subtlest and most implicate level of Reality, events express themselves with increasing degrees of profoundly interconnected, self-referential and therefore “non-local” behavior.

The idea of pure potentiality, which Bohm attributed to the level of the “implicate order” is in fact a shared metaphysical idea of all civilizations and traditional theologies of the world religions and it is the Iqbalian formulation as well of “…..the ultimate ground of all experience”13 about which he had said “Like pearls do we live and move and have our being in the perpetual flow of Divine life”14 and “The world, in all its details, from the mechanical movement of what we call the atom of matter to the free movement of thought in the human ego, is the self-revelation of the ‘Great I am’”15 and– to use the Hindu terms for the same narrative– “The physical and metaphysical aspects of the Ultimate Reality, according to the Vedantic perspective, form a seamless unity. The physical universe and everything in it is a manifestation of an underlying metaphysical reality that is infinite, timeless, unmanifest. This metaphysical and spiritual source of all existence is called Brahma. Everything in the universe arises from Brahma in the way that waves arise from the ocean and some of the things that arise from It are us. As physical beings we take form out of this one eternal, limitless reservoir of all Being. This Brahma is not a thing in the usual sense, since it has no form or mass, nor duration (in this sense, it is nothing– no thing– with reference to the world of time and space and matter), but it is also not a vacuum or void like empty space. It is reservoir of pure potentiality out of which all reality emerges from nano second to nanosecond; it is the Beyond Being that flowers into all forms of being.”

To formulate the doctrine in the language of Islamic mystical Theology one can present it in the following manner: the Supreme Principle is both Necessary Being and the Sovereign Good; it is Being with respect to its Reality, and Good with respect to its Positivity– or its Qualitative Potentiality– for on the one hand, “I am that I am,” and on the other, “God alone is good.” From “Necessary” Being is derived “possible” being– which may be or may not be– that is, existence; and all manifested qualities are derived from the Sovereign Good which is their only cause or essence.

Or to formulate the doctrine in a more religious specific (i.e. Islamic/Qur’anic/Hadith) language one may look at a few of the Qur’anic verses, since they provide a convenient introduction to basic Islamic ideas about the relationship between God and the cosmos and God and human beings:

Surely We have created everything with a measuring out. (54:49)There is nothing whose treasuries are not with Us, and We send it down

only with a known measuring out. (15.21)A famous Hadīth could be added to it. “I was a Hidden Treasure, so I

loved to be known. Hence I created the creatures that I might be known.”16 These two verses and the Hadīth illustrate the basic Qur’anic themes that God is the source of all things, so all things are found with him. Whether they are with him in the Unseen or with us in the Visible, he knows them:With Him are the keys to the Unseen, none knows them but He. He knows what is in land and sea, not a leaf falls, but He knows it. Not a grain in the earth’s shadows, not a thing, fresh or withered, but it is in an explicit Book.

(6:59)When God creates something, he brings it into existence. At the same

time, he keeps with himself the treasuries from which he provides for the thing’s existence. These treasuries represent the good and the real, which belong only to God. "There is nothing real but the Real." In more detail,

the treasuries represent the divine attributes, which are the sources for all good and real qualities in the world. Hence, a things life is supplied from Gods treasury of life, a thing’s power from his treasury of power, a thing’s compassion from his treasury of compassion. Who decides what it is that things receive from the treasuries? The owner of the treasuries. What is his decision called? Measuring out. He measures out knowledge, power, mercy, good, and so on. No created thing is able to control its share of these qualities. Everything participates in the real qualities of existence only to the extent that Reality allows it to participate; God is on the giving end, and created things are on the receiving end.

In short, when we discuss God and tawhīd, the discussion takes place on three different levels. First, we recognize that a single reality is there (the essence), hidden behind the diversity of appearances. Second, we describe the ways in which that thing appears to us, and our descriptions are called attributes. Third, we describe the things that are apparent before our eyes as acts and we recognize that these acts depend upon those attributes.

God (add)— God’s acts are all the things that he creates in the universe throughout time and space. The universe, or cosmos– in all its temporal and spatial extension– is a single infinite act that externalizes everything that God knows about it in his infinite knowledge.

Islam is not alone in saying that. In all the metaphysical doctrines of the East and (Premodern) West , there was the premise that the physical world, the realm of change an impermanence, rises out of an unmanifest reality, and that Reality itself is also non-local.17 Bohm was arguing,18 that all of reality is interconnected, and it is to be noted that Bohm didn’t leave the phenomenon of consciousness out of his theory regarding this interconnectedness. In fact, Bohm had devoted two full chapters of his book to a discussion of the nature of consciousness, arguing that as matter and energy were once treated as separate entities, along with space and time, perhaps nothing, including consciousness and matter, is ultimately

separate from anything else. Reality merely comprises varying densities of one infinitely self-referential and all-inclusive phenomenon (Iqbal’s parallel with Bohm’s formulation, which he termed as the “ultimate ground of all experience [read: phenomenon], despite Bohm’s non-theological scientific terminology, would not have been lost on the readers!) Where Newtonians and strict materialists had argued that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter (consciousness having developed slowly as a by-product of increasingly sophisticated stages of biological evolution), Bohm wondered if it might not be the other way around. Perhaps material creation is actually an epiphenomenon of consciousness. And this compels us to think, what if, in terms of another context altogether, it could be that people are all connected on a deeper level of reality (which different theories of psychology/neuroscience, like Jung’s and Campbell’s collective unconscious and their later day variants, had been grappling to understand) because that level of physical existence retains more of the absolute interconnectivity endemic to the deepest level of Being? Could the collective unconscious exist closer to the Pure Consciousness from which all superficial levels of our psyches (and all other things in the world) arise?

It was ironic that at this time when metaphysics had been barred from philosophy and couldn’t be taken seriously in the academic study of religion, it was being legitimately considered in the discipline of Physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. Einstein had replaced Newton’s view of a three-dimensional universe floating in linear time with a four-dimensional space-time continuum where matter and energy are transposable. Quantum mechanics had suggested that the universe isn’t built out of atoms or any other absolute or indivisible particles, but rather is a complex interaction of energetic processes arising from pure potentiality (the Hidden Treasure, the Divine Ground of Being, the Brahma19 and, “the ultimate ground of all experience”, “Its boundlessness is potential..” of Iqbal). The universe, composed of interrelated vibratory

events, is more like a cosmic interference pattern than a structure comprising discrete material objects. In fact, with reference to objects, quantum physics was– and is– entirely undermining the materialists’ viewpoint, and so Bohm was simply adding support to this position. Even he came to see that his views had a definite resonance with certain ancient viewpoints, and later in his life he would discuss these similarities with mystics of several traditions.20 The similarity between Bohm’s views and certain tenants of the traditional metaphysical doctrines suggests that science was bringing metaphysics out of mothballs. Now that metaphysics (read: God) had been returned to physics perhaps it could also be returned to philosophy and the academic study of religion! This is in complete accord with the Iqbalian project. Strict materialism had had its day, and the next step in the development of the hard sciences suggested that the ancient traditions hadn’t been as wrong as the modernists had supposed. What Iqbal had said about the Newtonian view of reality in 1929,21 “Classical Physics has learned to criticize its own foundations. As a result of this criticism the kind of materialism, which it originally necessitated, is rapidly disappearing; and the day is not far off when Religion and Science may discover hitherto unsuspected mutual harmonies.”22 It resounds in a contemporary review of the intellectual milieu, “The developments in science have undercut a kind of crass Newtonian view of reality as consisting of ultimate little atoms that are unrelated to other things– our century has undercut that. The interrelation between the parts of being– which David Bohm23 emphasizes with his concept of implicate wholeness– clearly is a move back toward the unity which traditional philosophies, those of Asia included, emphasized.”

It also deserves mention here that thirty-four years earlier, in 1946, Erwin Schrodinger, the winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics,4 had commented in his book What is Life?, “The point of view taken here levels with what Aldous Huxley has recently– and very appropriately– called The Perennial Philosophy.24 Schrodinger agreed with Huxley, though he knew

Huxley’s views contradicted the scientific dogma of their time, because Schrodinger believed metaphysics might actually be important even to physics, and so he later commented in Mind and Matter (1958): “It is relatively easy to sweep away the whole of metaphysics, as Kant did.[…]. But you must not think that what has been achieved is the actual elimination of metaphysics from the empirical content of human knowledge. In fact, if we cut out all metaphysics it will be found to be vastly more difficult, indeed probably quite impossible, to give any intelligible account of even the most circumscribed area of specialization within any specialized science.”25

It is important to note that Bohm was the first to give a complex explanation of how it actually worked. Modernism, with its view that humankind can only know what science can prove, held sway in academic circles for nearly a century, so to suggest, as Bohm had done, that this was an antiquated view constituted an attack on modernism’s root assumption. In short, Bohm was arguing that there is a facet of reality that science cannot see. Bohm, like Schrodinger, was saying that the best understanding of the universe necessitated the acceptance of the view that reality has a metaphysical aspect, an aspect that by definition could never be directly quantified or measured, though its effects in the realm of time and space could be. And this is precisely what Iqbal had proposed to detail in his 2nd Lecture with reference to the Qur’anic verse “He is the First (Al-Awwal) and the last (Al-Ākhir) and the Outward (Al-Ẓāhir) and the Inward (Al-Bāṭin). 26

*****

1 One of the Iqbal’s remarks reads as follows: “The infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word God’s infinity is intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series.” (M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 57-58.)2 One of the more common and probably best known terms that Ibn al-ʿArabī employs for the nonexistent objects of God's knowledge is "immutable entity" (‘ayn thābita). Entity here is synonymous with "thing" (shay'), and "thing," as should be apparent from the way I have been employing the term all along, is "one of the most indefinite of the indefinites" (min ankar al-nakirāt), since it can be applied to anything whatsoever, existent or nonexistent (though it is not normally applied to God as Being). The "existent things" are the creatures of the cosmos (though never ceasing to be nonexistent objects of God's knowledge). The "nonexistent things" are objects of knowledge, also called the "immutable entities." These things or entities are immutable because they never change, just as God's knowledge never changes. He knows them for all eternity.3 “The scientific method . . . has created an economic, political and educational system that values facts over curiosity, financial gains over social contributions, precision over insights.”4 In order to avoid all confusion it should be observed that the word Brahma, without an accent, is neuter while the word Brahmā is masculine ; the use, current among orientalists, of the single form Brahman, which is common to both genders, has the serious disadvantage of obscuring this essential distinction, which is sometimes further marked by expressions such as Pāra-Brahma or the “Supreme Brahma,” and Apāra-Brahma or the “non-supreme; Brahma:”5 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 50.6 Iqbal’s critique of Einstein goes like this: “Personally, I believe that the ultimate character of Reality is spiritual: but in order to avoid a widespread misunderstanding it is necessary to point out that Einstein’s theory, which, as a scientific theory, deals only with the structure of things, throws no light on the ultimate nature of things which possess that structure. The philosophical value of the theory is twofold. First, it destroys, not the objectivity of Nature, but the view of substance as simple location in space– a view which led to materialism in Classical Physics. “Substance” for modern Relativity-Physics is not a persistent thing with variable states, but a system of interrelated events. In Whitehead’s presentation of the theory the notion of “matter” is entirely replaced by the notion of “organism”. Secondly, the theory makes space dependent on matter. The universe, according to Einstein, is not a kind of island in an infinite space; it is finite but boundless; beyond it there is no empty space. In the absence of matter the universe would shrink to a point. Looking, however, at the theory from the standpoint that I have taken in these lectures, Einstein’s Relativity presents one great difficulty, i.e. the unreality of time. A theory which takes time to be a kind of fourth dimension of space must, it seems, regard the future as something already given, as indubitably fixed as the past. Time as a free creative movement has no meaning for the theory. It does not pass. Events do not happen; we simply meet them. It must not, however, be forgotten that the theory neglects certain characteristics of time as experienced by us; and it is not possible to say that the nature of time

is exhausted by the characteristics which the theory does note in the interests of a systematic account of those aspects of Nature which can be mathematically treated. Nor is it possible for us laymen to understand what the real nature of Einstein’s time is. It is obvious that Einstein’s time is not Bergson’s pure duration. Nor can we regard it as serial time. Serial time is the essence of causality as defined by Kant. The cause and its effect are mutually so related that the former is chronologically prior to the latter, so that if the former is not, the latter cannot be. If mathematical time is serial time, then on the basis of the theory it is possible, by a careful choice of the velocities of the observer and the system in which a given set of events is happening, to make the effect precede its cause. It appears to me that time regarded as a fourth dimension of space really ceases to be time.”….. “Whitehead’s view of Relativity is likely to appeal to Muslim students more than that of Einstein in whose theory time loses its character of passage and mysteriously translates itself into utter space.” The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 31-32; 106.7 Known in the language of Far Eastern metaphysic as the distinction between “Non-Being” and “Being.”8 Qur’an, 41: 53.9 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 146.10 Also argued earlier by John Stewart Bell.11 One of the Iqbal’s remarks reads as follows: “The infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word God’s infinity is intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series.” (M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 57-58.)12 One of the more common and probably best known terms that Ibn al-ʿArabī employs for the nonexistent objects of God's knowledge is "immutable entity" (‘ayn thābita). Entity here is synonymous with "thing" (shay'), and "thing," as should be apparent from the way I have been employing the term all along, is "one of the most indefinite of the indefinites" (min ankar al-nakirāt), since it can be applied to anything whatsoever, existent or nonexistent (though it is not normally applied to God as Being). The "existent things" are the creatures of the cosmos (though never ceasing to be nonexistent objects of God's knowledge). The "nonexistent things" are objects of knowledge, also called the "immutable entities." These things or entities are immutable because they never change, just as God's knowledge never changes. He knows them for all eternity.13 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 50.14 Underlying the human self and animating it is a reservoir of being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is unrestricted in consciousness and bliss. This infinite center of every life, this hidden self, is no less than the Godhead. Body, personality, and this infinite center– a human self is not completely accounted for until all three are noted. That was not only Iqbal’s fundamental position, as reflected in this quatrain, but the shared “anthropocosmic” vision of all wisdom traditions of the world.15 This is reference to Qur’an, 20: 14. The statement continues: “Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is an ego. But there are degrees in the expression of egohood.” (M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of

Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. 57-58.)16 This saying, attributed in Sufi texts to the Prophet, is better known in the form, "I was a Hidden Treasure, so I loved to be known. Hence I created the creatures that I might be known." The scholars of Hadith consider it a forgery, as the Shaykh is well-aware. However, in his view its authenticity has been proven by unveiling (kashf), or vision of the Prophet in the imaginal world. Hence he writes that this hadith "is sound on the basis of unveiling, but not established by way of transmission (naql)" (II 399.28). 17 For Hindus, information about the totality of the universe is contained in each discrete moment of creation, which they then describe with the visual analogy of the “Jewel Net of Indra.” Reality is depicted in the analogy as an expansive net created by the god Indra, and at each junction in the threads of the net there is a highly reflective jewel. Each of these jewels can be seen reflected in all the other jewels, and the reflections of all of the jewels are contained in each jewel. So in the Vedantic conception, each discrete moment of creation contains the blueprint of the entire universe–or, to mix metaphors, the entire creation is contained in the ‘DNA’ of each moment of creation. For Vedantists, the entire universe can be– as it were– cloned from any aspect of the universe, though it is also, and somewhat enigmatically, a discrete moment in the jewel net of Indra.18 In accord with Advaita (‘non-dual,’ or even ‘non-local’) Vedanta.19 In order to avoid all confusion it should be observed that the word Brahma, without an accent, is neuter while the word Brahma is masculine ; the use, current among orientalists, of the single form Brahman, which is common to both genders, has the serious disadvantage of obscuring this essential distinction, which is sometimes further marked by expressions such as Pāra-Brahma or the “Supreme Brahma,” and Apāra-Brahma or the “non-supreme; Brahma:”20 Most notably with Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian holy man.21 M. Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious thought in Islam, IAP, Lahore, 1987, pp. xxii.22 “Science can prove nothing about God, because God lies outside its province. But … its resources for deepening religious insights and enriching religious thinking are inexhaustible.” (Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, p. 137.)“We must be careful here,” Smith says in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, “for science cannot take a single step toward proving transcendence. But what it proves in its own domain in the way of unity, inter-relatedness, the ‘immaterial,’ and the awesome makes it one of the most powerful symbols of transcendence our age affords.”Religious triumphalism died a century or two ago, and its scientistic counterpart seems now to be following suit. Here and there diehards turn up–Richard Dawkins, who likens belief in God to belief in fairies, and Daniel Dennett, with his claim that John Locke’s belief that mind must precede matter was born of the kind of conceptual paralysis that is now as obsolete as the quill pen– but these echoes of Julian Huxley’s pronouncement around mid-century that “it will soon be as impossible for an intelligent or educated man or woman to believe in god as it is now to believe that the earth is flat” are now pretty much recognized as polemical bluster. It seems clear that both science and religion are here to stay. E. O. Wilson would be as pleased as anyone to see religion fail the Darwinian test, but he admits that we seem to have a religious gene in us and he sees no

way of getting rid of it. “Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion,” he writes, “but this notion has never seemed so futile as today.” With both of these forces as permanent fixtures in history, the obvious question is how they are to get along. Alfred North Whitehead was of the opinion that, more than on any other single factor, the future of humanity depends on the way these two most powerful forces in history settle into relationship with each other, and their interface is being addressed today with a zeal that has not been seen since modern science arose. (Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, p. 72-73.)23 It’s important to note that Bohm wasn’t the first quantum physicist to allow metaphysics back into the discussion or to suggest that mystics of the ancient world had had accurate intuitions about the nature of reality.24 Erwin Schrodinger, Was ist Leben, Bern, 1946, p.128.25 Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter, Munster, Germany, 2007, p. 224, 230.26 Qur’an, 41: 53