The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra

An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism - 35th Anniversary Edition.

Knowing and seeing

It is important to realize the difference between the mathematical
models and their verbal counterparts. The former are
rigorous and consistent as far as their internal structure is
concerned, but their symbols are not directly related to our
experience. The verbal models, on the other hand, use concepts
which can be understood intuitively, but are always
inaccurate and ambiguous. They are in this respect not
different from philosophical models of reality and thus the two
can very well be compared.
If there is an intuitive element in science, there is also a rational
element in Eastern mysticism.

Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in
words-be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images
or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations
imposed by language and ‘linear’ thinking. Modern
physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard
to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate
and necessarily inaccurate.

Beyond Language

Zen Buddhists have a particular knack for making a virtue
out of the inconsistencies arising from verbal communication,
and with the koan system they have developed a unique way
of transmitting their teachings completely non-verbally. Koans
are carefully devised nonsensical riddles which are meant to
make the student of Zen realize the limitations of logic and
reasoning in the most dramatic way. The irrational wording
and paradoxical content of these riddles makes it impossible
to solve them by thinking. They are designed precisely to stop
the thought process and thus to make the student ready for
the non-verbal experience of reality.

Chinese Thought

Both the Confucian Analects and the Tao Te Ching are written
in the compact suggestive style which is typical of the Chinese
way of thinking. The Chinese mind was not given to abstract
logical thinking and developed a language which is very
different from that which evolved in the West. Many of its
words could be used as nouns, adjectives or verbs, and their
sequence was determined not so much by grammatical rules
as by the emotional content of the sentence. The classical
Chinese word was very different from an abstract sign representing
a clearly delineated concept. It was rather a sound
symbol which had strong suggestive powers, bringing to mind
an indeterminate complex of pictorial images and emotions.
The intention of the speaker was not so much to express an
intellectual idea, but rather to affect and influence the listener.
Correspondingly, the written character was not just an abstract
sign, but an organic pattern-a ‘gestalt’-which preserved the full
complex of images and the suggestive power of the word.

Taoism

The Chinese, like the Indians, believed that there is an ultimate
reality which underlies and unifies the multiple things and
events we observe:

There are the three terms-‘complete’, ‘all-embracing’,
‘the whole’. These names are different, but the reality
sought in them is the same: referring to the One thing.

They called this reality the Tao, which originally meant ‘the
Way’.

The Chinese believe that
whenever a situation develops to its extreme, it is bound to
turn around and become its opposite.

 In the Chinese view, it is better to have too little than to have
too much, and better to leave things undone than to overdo
them, because although one may not get very far this way
one is certain to go in the right direction. Just as the man who
wants to go further and further East will end up in the West,...

For the Western mind, this
idea of the implicit unity of all opposites is extremely difficult to
accept. It seems most paradoxical to us that experiences and
values which we had always believed to be contrary should
be, after all, aspects of the same thing. In the East, however,
it has always been considered as essential for attaining enlightenment
to go ‘beyond earthly opposites’ and in China
the polar relationship of all opposites lies at the very basis of
Taoist thought. Thus Chuang Tzu says,

The ‘this’ is also ‘that’. The ‘that’ is also ‘this’ . . . That the
‘that’ and the ‘this’ cease to be opposites is the very
essence of Tao. Only this essence, an axis as it were, is
the centre of the circle responding to the endless changes.

From the notion that the movements of the Tao are a
continuous interplay between opposites, the Taoists deduced
two basic rules for human conduct. Whenever you want to
achieve anything, they said, you should start with its opposite.
Thus Lao Tzu:

In order to contract a thing, one should surely expand it
first.
In order to weaken, one will surely strengthen first.
In order to overthrow, one will surely exalt first.
‘In order to take, one will surely give first.’
This is called subtle wisdom.’

On the other hand, whenever you want to retain anything,
you should admit in it something of its opposite:

Be bent, and you will remain straight.
Be vacant, and you will remain full.
Be worn, and you will remain new.

The Unity of All Things

The crucial feature of atomic physics is that the human
observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an
object, but is necessary even to define these properties. In
atomic physics, we cannot talk about the properties of an
object as such. They are only meaningful in the context of the
object’s interaction with the observer. In the words of Heisenberg,
‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed
to our method of questioning.‘ The observer decides how he
is going to set up the measurement and this arrangement will
determine, to some extent, the properties of the observed
object. If the experimental arrangement is modified, the
properties of the observed object will change in turn.

The idea of ‘participation instead of observation’ has been
formulated in modern physics only recently, but it is an idea
which is well known to any student of mysticism. Mystical
knowledge can never be obtained just by observation, but
only by full participation with one’s whole being. The notion
of the participator is thus crucial to the Eastern world view,
and the Eastern mystics have pushed this notion to the extreme,
to a point where observer and observed, subject and object,
are not only inseparable but also become indistinguishable.

The mystics are not satisfied with a situation analogous to
atomic physics, where the observer and the observed cannot
be separated, but can still be distinguished. They go much
further, and in deep meditation they arrive at a point where
the distinction between observer and observed breaks down
completely, where subject and object fuse into a unified
undifferentiated whole. Thus the Upanishads say,

Where there is a duality, as it were, there one sees
another; there one smells another; there one tastes
another . . . But where everything has become just one’s
own self, then whereby and whom would one see? then
whereby and whom would one smell? then whereby and
whom would one taste?

Beyond the World of Opposites

One of the principal polarities in life is the one between the
male and female sides of human nature. As with the polarity
of good and bad, or of life and death, we tend to feel uncomfortable
with the male/female polarity in ourselves, and
therefore we bring one or the other side into prominence.
Western society has traditionally favoured the male side rather
than the female. Instead of recognizing that the personality
of each man and of each woman is the result of an interplay
between female and male elements, it has established a static
order where all men are supposed to be masculine and all
women feminine, and it has given men the leading roles and
most of society’s privileges. This attitude has resulted in an
over-emphasis of all the yang-or male-aspects of human
nature: activity, rational thinking, competition, aggressiveness,
and so on. The yin-or female-modes of consciousness,
which can be described by words like intuitive, religious,
mystical, occult or psychic, have constantly been suppressed
in our male-oriented society.
In Eastern mysticism, these female modes are developed and
a unity between the two aspects of human nature is sought.
A fully realized human being is one who, in the words of Lao
Tzu, ‘knows the masculine and yet keeps to the feminine’.
In many Eastern traditions the dynamic balance between the
male and female modes of consciousness is the principal aim
of meditation, and is often illustrated in works of art.

Examples of the unification of opposite concepts in modern
physics can be found at the subatomic level, where particles
are both destructible and indestructible; where matter is
both continuous and discontinuous, and force and matter are
but different aspects of the same phenomenon.

The Dynamic Universe

Vedic concept of Rita anticipates the idea of karma
which was developed later to express the dynamic interplay
of all things and events. The word karma means ‘action’ and
denotes the ‘active’, or dynamic, interrelation of all phenomena.
In the words of the Bhagavad Cita, ‘All actions take place in
time by the interweaving of the forces of nature.‘5 The Buddha
took up the traditional concept of karma and gave it a new
meaning by extending the idea of dynamic interconnections
to the sphere of human situations. Karma thus came to signify
the never-ending chain of cause and effect in human life which
the Buddha had broken in attaining the state of enlightenment.

Buddhists call this world of ceaseless change samsara,
which means, literally, ‘incessantly in motion’; and they affirm
that there is nothing in it which is worth clinging to. So for the
Buddhists, an enlightened being is one who does not resist
the flow of life, but keeps moving with it. When the Ch’an
monk’ Yin-men was asked, What is the Tao?’ he answered
simply, Walk on!’ Accordingly, Buddhists also call the Buddha
the Tathagata, or ‘the one who comes and goes thus’. In
Chinese philosophy, the flowing and ever-changing reality is
called the Tao and is seen as a cosmic process in which all
things are involved. Like the Buddhists, the Taoists say that one
should not resist the flow, but should adapt one’s actions to it.
This, again, is characteristic of the sage-the enlightened
being.

 The discovery that mass is nothing but a form of energy has
forced us to modify our concept of a particle in an essential
way. In modern physics, mass is no longer associated with a
material substance, and hence particles are not seen as consisting
of any basic ‘stuff’, but as bundles of energy. Since
energy, however, is associated with activity, with processes,
the implication is that the nature of subatomic particles is
intrinsically dynamic. To understand this better, we must
remember that these particles can only be conceived in relativistic
terms, that is, in terms of a framework where space and
time are fused into a four-dimensional continuum. The particles
must not be pictured as static three-dimensional objects, like
billiard balls or grains of sand, but rather as four-dimensional
entities in space-time. Their forms have to be understood
dynamically, as forms in space and time. Subatomic particles
are dynamic patterns which have a space aspect and a time
aspect. Their space aspect makes them appear as objects
with a certain mass, their time aspect as processes involving
the equivalent energy.
These dynamic patterns, or ‘energy bundles’, form the stable
nuclear, atomic and molecular structures which build up
matter and give it its macroscopic solid aspect, thus making us
believe that it is made of some material substance. At the
macroscopic level, this notion of substance is a useful approximation,
but at the atomic level it no longer makes sense. Atoms
consist of particles and these particles are not made of any
material stuff. When we observe them, we never see any
substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually
changing into one another-a continuous dance of energy.