Meditation

On Light and Darkness

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), whose life epitome reflects the Lord's ancient query to Job (Job 38,19-20, emphasis mine)

¹⁹ "Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness,

²⁰ that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home?"

bestowed on humanity dramatic new insight into the phenomena of light. Having soared higher than others, he died without finding that dwelling place. Nevertheless, in his willingness to "leave home" in search of truth, he carried us farther than others on this quest. Notably, he was born in the very year that the current age of the Archangel Michael began, the Archangel who administers the divine intelligence.

David Bodanis, seemingly another one of those gems of profound thinking to emerge from the faculty of Oxford University, has written a most delightful and helpful little book entitled

E = mc²
A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation.

Probably more than any other he has opened the door to nonexperts to a degree of comprehension of this terse gem (see fn 13 in the "Light" essay). Its symbols, of course, are fairly well known, namely:

E is for Energy
= means that what is on the left side of it is equal to what is on its right side
m is for mass
c is for the speed of light, which in the formula is squared.

As every schoolchild knows (or thinks it knows), the speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second, or about 670 million miles per hour. When squared, this latter becomes 448.9 quadrillion, or 448,900,000,000,000,000, "square" m.p.h. That distance is a long way by our normal earthly thinking. Yet it is not so enormous when we speak so easily of a "light year," which is 5.88 trillion, or 5,880,000,000,000, miles. In describing our known universe, which seems to be exploding outward at nearly the speed of light (i.e., becoming less dense?), our astronomers speak of distances in terms of billions of light years.¹

One of the simpler rules of mathematics is that when a multiplier (i.e., c² in this instance) is moved from one side of the equation to the other, it becomes a divisor on the other side. Thus, if instead of multiplying the mass (m) by c² we move the latter from the right side of the equation to the left, we then divide the energy ( E ) by the same c². Since c² is such an enormous number, we immediately see that, moving in one direction, it takes an enormous amount of energy to produce a tiny bit of mass; conversely, when moving in the opposite direction, it only takes a tiny bit of mass to produce an enormous amount of energy.

Sadly, during the twentieth century, or roughly the first third of the current Michaelic Age, the most recognized application of this discovery has been its power to destroy through the agency of the atomic bomb. (In a sense, this could represent the destructive power of the Sun on earthly life.) We have even tried to dramatically enhance this destructive power through what is called the hydrogen bomb, in which an initial atomic explosion (brought about by "fission" of atoms) creates the necessary heat and pressure to start a process of "fusion" of the heavy isotopes of hydrogen. So terrifying is this destructive power that we can only pray it will either be abandoned or turned only into constructive use.

In a way, these discoveries and applications by humanity in the twentieth century are themselves an image, or negative, however presumptuous, of the Creator God, perhaps not at all unlike the portrayal in Gen 11,2-9 of the legendary "tower of Babel," archetypal symbol of human arrogance and pride. To preserve our own material being, status and privilege, we will destroy our brother and sister creatures who threaten it.

This is the dark, and spiritually fearsome, side of the meditation.

Let us return to the more constructive, and hopefully higher, path.

Let us think, from what has gone before in this volume, of the nature of spiritual activity. We conceive of it in terms of such immense energy and velocity that it disappears beyond the border of the world of matter and that of ether, transcending beyond that into the astral, then the lower devachan (spiritual) and into the higher devachan (spiritual), through the ranks of the nine spiritual hierarchies and finally back into the waiting arms of the Creator God, the ultimate union of all things (Eph 1,9-10). We would simplify this because our minds cannot stretch so far, just as our minds cannot stretch to the vast expanses of our known universe. But if we subscribe to what the Bible tells us, we must see that it is from this non-material realm that all matter came into being, and it is back into this nonmaterial realm that all must return.

And do we not have, in this little equation, the "sign" that points us in this direction?

Think what immense energy came forth to create the imponderable mass of our universe. A tiny example of its magnitude can be grasped in the following passage from Part Three of Bodanis' book (p. 77):

Put a single pound of mass into the "m" slot, and after multiplying by the vast 448,900,000,000,000,000 value of c², the equation promises that, in principle, you could get over 10 billion kilowatt hours of energy. This is comparable to a huge power station. That's how a small atomic bomb—with a core small enough to fit in your cupped hands—could heave out enough energy to rip open streets and buried fuel lines; to shatter street after street of brick buildings; to tear open the bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers and children and teachers and bus drivers.

He points out that this bomb works "when less than one percent of the mass inside it gets turned into energy." And we are speaking of one pound, an unimaginable speck in relation to the mass of our solar system alone, itself an unimaginable speck (materially speaking) in the universe. I have previously suggested herein, based upon Steiner's seemingly very clear Intuition, that, contrary to the kinetic reasoning of science, the interior of stars is not mass but the polar opposite of mass. They are the spiritual forces that generate this immense power within the universe and balance out the known and unknown (such as undiscovered "black holes") matter within it. They are, instead of gravitational forces, forces of suction. In that respect, they are in the image of the Creator God who sucks our universe outward in a process of becoming less dense and being drawn into the Creator God itself (cf. Jn 12,32). As the stars themselves sacrifice their power within the universe, they move, along with their children (universal matter) into the Creator God's waiting arms as the universe explodes outward in attenuation.

As humanity moves toward the spiritual, mass is gradually turned into energy under this famous formula, and as humanity ("sons of God") redeems its own material bodies in this manner, it also moves forward in the redemption of its lower servant kingdoms, its little "brothers" and "sisters" (Rom 8,19-23).

In at least one respect there is a similarity between Steiner's revelation about the suction (i.e., negative mass) emanating from the interior of the Sun (and other outer stars) and Einstein's famous equation. No one paid any attention to the latter for a while. They were both expounding at the same time. That only Einstein's theory has been accepted just points to the fact that Einstein has thus far been applied only in the world of matter. But he gave us an image pointing to what Steiner has said.

That image, among other things, suggests the immensity of suffering endured by the Creator God (through its Christ aspect) long before the earthly Crucifixion occurred. In fact, the Crucifixion would have been only the tip of a mighty iceberg of suffering.² If we conceive, as we should, of the source of the E in Einstein's famous equation as being from the energy and velocity of the spiritual world (neither, of course, being measurable or even detectable by human instrumentation), and of the m as being the vast mass of our solar system (and even of all the universe) that was brought into existence through that energy and velocity, we begin to think in terms of such unspeakable magnitude that would dwarf our own incomprehensible universe. We then recognize this unspeakable magnitude as the Christ (being one with the Creator God, by whatever name called). For that spiritual power to have "descended" by contraction through the vast globe of created matter into a human body must bring forth contemplation of pain far beyond human comprehension—pain so vast and intense that death by Crucifixion, as horrible as it was, could have been only an earthly reflection of something far greater. The love expressed by John 3,16, "For God so loved the world …," must be exponentially enlarged by any such contemplation.