PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON OF CARL JUNG’S TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD SUSSKIND’S...
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PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON OF CARL JUNG’S TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD SUSSKIND’S HOLOGRAPHIC STRING THEORY by Timothy Desmond A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness California Institute of Integral Studies San Francisco, CA 2014
Transcript of PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON OF CARL JUNG’S TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD SUSSKIND’S...
PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON OF CARL JUNG’S
TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD SUSSKIND’S
HOLOGRAPHIC STRING THEORY
by
Timothy Desmond
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral
Studies
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in
Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
California Institute of Integral Studies
San Francisco, CA
2014
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CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON
OF CARL JUNG’S TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD
SUSSKIND’S HOLOGRAPHIC STRING THEORY by Timothy Desmond, and
that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a dissertation
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology, and
Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Sean Kelly, Ph.D. Chair
Professor, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
Brian Swimme, Ph.D
Professor, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
F. David Peat, Ph.D
Director, Pari Center for New Learning
© 2014 Timothy Desmond
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Timothy Desmond
California Institute of Integral Studies, 2014
Sean Kelly, Ph.D., Committee Chair
PSYCHE=SINGULARITY: A COMPARISON OF CARL JUNG’S
TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LEONARD SUSSKIND’S
HOLOGRAPHIC STRING THEORY
ABSTRACT
In this dissertation I discern what Carl Jung calls the mandala image of the
ultimate archetype of unity underlying and structuring cosmos and psyche by
pointing out parallels between his transpersonal psychology and Stanford
physicist Leonard Susskind’s string theory. Despite his atheistic, materialistically
reductionist interpretation of it, I demonstrate how Susskind’s string theory of
holographic information conservation at the event horizons of black holes, and the
cosmic horizon of the universe, corroborates the following four topics about
which Jung wrote: (1) his near-death experience of the cosmic horizon after a
heart attack in 1944; ( 2) his equation relating psychic energy to mass,
“Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space” (1997, 162), which I translate
into the equation, Psyche=Singularity; (3) his theory that the mandala, a circle or
sphere with a central point, is the symbolic image of the ultimate archetype of
unity through the union of opposites, which structures both cosmos and psyche,
and which rises spontaneously from the collective unconscious to compensate a
conscious mind torn by irreconcilable demands (1989, 334-335, 396-397); and (4)
his theory of synchronicity. I argue that Susskind’s inside-out black hole model of
our Big Bang universe forms a geometrically perfect mandala: a central
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Singularity encompassed by a two-dimensional sphere which serves as a universal
memory bank. Moreover, in precise fulfillment of Jung’s theory, Susskind used
that mandala to reconcile the notoriously incommensurable paradigms of general
relativity and quantum mechanics, providing in the process a mathematically
plausible explanation for Jung’s near-death experience of his past, present, and
future life simultaneously at the cosmic horizon. Finally, Susskind’s theory also
provides a plausible cosmological model to explain Jung’s theory of
synchronicity—meaningful coincidences may be tied together by strings at the
cosmic horizon, from which they radiate inward as the holographic “movie” of
our three-dimensional world.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To James and Cecilia Desmond
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................... IV
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................. VI
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................... X
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1
Susskind, Jung, and Pauli.................................................................................. 2
Chapter Summary ............................................................................................. 7
Basics of Susskind’s String Theory ................................................................ 26
Basics of Jung’s Transpersonal Psychology ................................................... 63
CHAPTER 1: NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE AT THE COSMIC HORIZON .. 71
Jung’s NDE and Susskind’s String Theory: the Basic Framework ................ 72
Stanislav Grof on LSD and NDEs .................................................................. 77
Pim van Lommel ........................................................................................... 105
Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven .............................................................. 112
Jung’s Near-Death Experience of the Cosmic Horizon ................................ 119
CHAPTER 2: PSYCHE=SINGULARITY ......................................................... 127
The History of the Concept of a Gravitational Singularity ........................... 133
Empirical Evidence for Black Holes and the Big Bang ................................ 159
Controversy Over Infinity ............................................................................. 162
Hawking, the Singularity, and God............................................................... 165
On the Nature of the Psyche ......................................................................... 171
Jung’s Letters Equating Psychic Energy and Mass ...................................... 177
CHAPTER 3: BLACK HOLE AS UNIVERSAL MANDALA ......................... 181
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Review of Previous Chapters ........................................................................ 182
Outline of the Rest of Chapter 3 ................................................................... 192
The Pleroma as the Origin of Jung’s Mandala Theory ................................. 196
Jung’s Scientific Method of Identifying Mandalas as Images of the Self .... 206
“God is an intellectual figure whose center is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere” ............................................................................... 209
Jung’s Mandala Dreams: UFOs, the Dreaming Yogi, and the Black Hindu 218
Unit Circle as Mathematical Mandala of the One ........................................ 223
Susskind’s Reconciliation of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics . 240
CHAPTER 4: STRING THEORY AND SYNCHRONICITY .......................... 248
Jung’s Synchronicity Theory, his NDE, and Susskind’s String Theory ....... 255
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Musical Strings of the Dreaming Will ... 272
Synchronicity, the Axiom of Maria, and the Compassionate Love of a
Suffering God................................................................................................ 286
Synchronicities in the History of Science Culminating with Susskind’s String
Theory ........................................................................................................... 293
Astrological Synchronicity ........................................................................... 298
NDEs, String Theory, Astrology, and Plato’s Republic ............................... 307
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 313
Very Brief Review of Previous Chapters...................................................... 315
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit ................................... 317
Fourth Branch of Government ...................................................................... 322
Curriculum in Plato’s Republic and the Laws............................................... 331
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Jung’s NDE, Bhumi, and the Black Hindu ................................................... 335
REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 339
APPENDIX A: TUNNEL VISION .................................................................... 348
x
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Riemann Sphere A................................................................................. 21
Figure 2: Riemann Sphere B. .............................................................................. 228
1
INTRODUCTION
From the paramount positions of their respective fields, Carl Jung (1875-
1961) and Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) started constructing a conceptual bridge
to span the academic abyss separating psychology and physics. Like laying out
two parallel beams, they co-created a theory according to which the laws of
psychology mirror the laws of microphysics because mind and matter both radiate
from the same transcendental source, which, following the sixteenth-century
alchemist, Gerhard Dorn, they called the unus mundus, or “one world”
(Atmanspacher and Primas 2006, 19). His analysis of Pauli’s dreams furthermore
confirmed Jung’s theory that the unus mundus underlying matter and mind
spontaneously compensates a conscious mind being pulled between opposing
demands by presenting itself to that conscious mind in the symbolic image of a
mandala, a circle or sphere with a central point. According to Jung,
The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all
archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world, and is
therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a unus
mundus. (1997, 165)
If the unus mundus presents itself empirically as a mandala image to the psyche
we each perceive inwardly, in what observable form, if any, does it demonstrate
itself outwardly in the physical world we perceive collectively?
In this dissertation I extend Jung’s and Pauli’s collaborative line of
research by pointing out how Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind’s holographic
string theory description of black holes, and our “inside-out black hole” universe
(2008, 438), perfectly conforms to the mandala image of the archetype of unity
through the reconciliation of opposites that underlies and structures cosmos and
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psyche (Jung 1989, 334-335). I argue that, despite his packaging it as the ultimate
atheistic alternative to “the illusion of intelligent design” (which is the subtitle of
his 2006 book, The Cosmic Landscape), Susskind’s string theory interpretation of
the black hole model of the cosmos (a two-dimensional sphere encompassing a
central Singularity) clearly mirrors Jung’s transpersonal model of the psyche,
thereby revealing the Holy Grail, the mandala image of the ultimate One.
I will now introduce Susskind, Jung, and Pauli more formally. That
introduction will be followed by a brief chapter summary, as well as a more
thorough introduction to the basic terms and principles of Susskind’s holographic
string theory and those of Jung’s transpersonal psychology.
Susskind, Jung, and Pauli
Leonard Susskind is the Felix Block Professor of Theoretical Physics at
Stanford University, and author of several books, including: The Cosmic
Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (2006); and, The
Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for
Quantum Mechanics (2008). As he explains in his books, along with Yoichiro
Nambu and Holger Nielsen, Susskind helped pioneer the original quantum theory
of hadron-sized strings in the last two years of the 1960s (2006, 204-207). He then
helped pioneer the holographic interpretation of the much tinier, fundamental
strings in the first half of the 1990s (along with his partner, the Dutch Nobel
laureate, Gerard ’t Hooft). Susskind’s claim to fame, indicated by the subtitle of
The Black Hole War, is that he disproved Stephen Hawking’s former (and now
recanted) claim that, according to the predictions derived from the general theory
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of relativity, information that falls into a black hole is permanently lost from our
observable universe.
My overall strategy in this dissertation is to substantiate Jung’s theory that
there is a transcendental archetype of unity (unus mundus) underlying and
organizing cosmos and psyche by pointing out a mirror-symmetry between his
transpersonal psychology (culminating with his theory of the mandala image of
the unus mundus, which he also calls the archetype of the “Self,” in the psyche)
and Susskind’s holographic string theory (culminating with his mandala model of
black holes and the universe). It is especially pertinent to point out, therefore, that,
as indicated by the subtitle of The Cosmic Landscape, Susskind (2006) is an
avowed atheist and devout Darwinian who abhors all spiritual worldviews. Like a
defense lawyer, I emphasize Susskind’s atheism because it actually makes my
case much stronger. Susskind’s confrontational atheism renders his testimony
especially trustworthy for my purpose in as much as we can trust that he was not
trying to twist his string theory in a way that could be mystically construed; on the
contrary!
Carl Jung is the psychologist who, breaking from Sigmund Freud’s
materially reductionist psychology, pioneered instead the transpersonal theory of
a collective unconscious consisting of archetypal patterns underlying both
experience and behavior. Importantly for my dissertation, as David Lindorff
(2004) explains in his book, Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds,
from 1932 until Pauli’s death in 1958, Jung worked intimately with that Nobel
Prize winning physicist to delineate precisely the kind of mirror-symmetry
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between psychology and quantum theory that I am trying to point out with
Susskind’s string theory. My comparison of Susskind and Jung, in other words, is
a consistent continuation of Jung’s collaboration with Pauli. Moreover, in both of
his books (2006, 265-266, 269; 2008, 339) Susskind offers special respect to
Pauli’s key contributions to physics, which include, among other things, the
following: the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which explains the structure and
quantum mechanics of the interacting atoms on the Periodic Chart of chemical
elements; and Pauli’s successful prediction of the neutrino, which was later
discovered to be responsible for spreading the elemental atoms out of and away
from supernovas before those exploding stars collapse into neutron stars, thereby
seeding the galaxies with otherwise unobtainable elements (2006, 180-181).
Scientists like Susskind who theoretically reduce consciousness to random
chemical interactions should recognize the fact that the one physicist most
responsible for discovering what chemicals are, how they interact, and how they
are distributed throughout the universe, explicitly rejected materialistic
reductionism. In fact, Pauli overtly questioned the legitimacy of the standard
version of Darwinism, as Lindorff explains:
For the first time, to our knowledge, Pauli here expressed a view that
broke ranks with Darwin, arguing instead that the process of evolution was
directed toward the goal of completeness. . . . Coupled with the idea of
synchronicity as a creation in time, it eventually led him to question the
randomness of natural selection as proposed by Darwin. (2004, 59)
One wonders whether or not Susskind knew that Pauli worked with Jung for over
twenty-five years in the quest to synthesize spiritual psychology and
microphysics.
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In fact, Ken Wilber (2001), another leader in the field of transpersonal
psychology, compiled an anthology, Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the
World’s Greatest Physicists, in which we find written testimony from most of the
major pioneers of relativity theory and quantum theory (Heisenberg, Schrödinger,
Einstein, De Broglie, Jeans, Planck, Pauli, and Eddington) who interpret those
sciences spiritually, although not necessarily theistically. Evidently ignorant of
that fact, in the Introduction to The Cosmic Landscape, Susskind explains that his
book is about a debate between two camps. After explicitly excluding “Biblical
literalists,” Susskind uses apparently conciliatory language to create what I argue
is a false dichotomy between intelligent people who see the fine-tuning of nature
required for human beings to exist as a benevolent result of intelligent design in
the universe, and “hard-nosed, scientific types” who see the world as the
byproduct of random, purposeless forces (2006, 5-6). Susskind fails to mention
that the pioneers of relativity and quantum theory, who are obviously every bit as
“hard-nosed, scientific types” as Susskind, nevertheless rejected his philosophical
materialism in favor of variations of the Platonic-Jungian theory that the cosmos
is intelligently designed by eternal, mathematically intelligible, archetypal forms.
In his books, Susskind respectfully mentions those same giants of physics, and
humbly acknowledges his specific debt to most of them, but he never mentions
the fact that they philosophically interpreted their theories in precisely the way he
rejects.
Perhaps Susskind’s greatest scholarly oversight of all is his failure to even
mention, let alone give credit to David Bohm (1917-1992), the renowned
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physicist and associate of Einstein who first appealed to the science of holography
in an attempt to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, as Bohm
(1980) explains in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Considering
Susskind’s otherwise careful summary of the history of twentieth-century physics,
and his generous habit of acknowledging his specific debts to particular pioneers
of that field, there is no plausible excuse for his failure to mention the one
physicist who pioneered precisely the fusion of quantum mechanics, general
relativity, and holography on which Susskind stakes his claim to fame. The most
likely reason I can see for Susskind’s glaring omission is his reluctance to have
his overtly anti-spiritual interpretation of the holographic principle associated
with Bohm’s panpsychic interpretation of that same basic idea, well over a decade
earlier. The most important point to notice for the purpose of my dissertation is
that it is not at all a novel idea to interpret the holographic principle of physics in
a way that indicates a sentient cosmos; on the contrary, that was the original
intention articulated by the founder of holographic cosmology, David Bohm.
Bohm’s strategy was furthermore expanded to the field of neuroscience by the
Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram, to the field of transpersonal psychology by
Stanislav Grof, and to the field of political ecology by Al Gore, as he explains in
his best-seller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. In that book,
Gore says, “Indeed, my understanding of how God is manifest in the world can be
best conveyed through the metaphor of the hologram” (1992, 265). I refer to
Bohm’s, Grof’s, and Gore’s holographic interpretations of their respective fields
of study as I examine Susskind’s holographic string theory in more detail
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throughout the four chapters of this dissertation, the titles of which are as follows:
Chapter 1, “Near-Death Experience at the Cosmic Horizon”; Chapter 2,
“Psyche=Singularity”; Chapter 3, “Black Hole as Universal Mandala”; and
Chapter 4, “String Theory and Synchronicity.” After the following chapter
summary, I will continue this Introduction with a more thorough synopsis of the
basic principles of Susskind’s string theory, and Jung’s transpersonal psychology.
Chapter Summary
Chapter 1
In Chapter 1, “Near-Death Experience at the Cosmic Horizon,” I compare
Jung’s out-of-body (OBE) near-death experience (NDE) of the cosmic horizon
after a heart attack in 1944, which he recalls in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(1989, 290-296), with Susskind’s holographic string theory of information
conservation at the cosmic horizon, which he describes in his two books, The
Cosmic Landscape (2006), and, The Black Hole War (2008). According to
Susskind’s newest and strangest idea at the pinnacle of academic physics today,
our three-dimensional universe is essentially a holographic movie, an illusion
projected by one-dimensional threads of energy from a two-dimensional
holographic film at the cosmic horizon, where every bit of information from the
past, present, and future is eternally superimposed (2008, 180-181, 298-301).
There appears to be a logical flaw in calling the cosmic horizon two-dimensional
merely because it is perfectly flat, considering it contains all space and time. The
holographic cosmic horizon Susskind describes is more accurately described as a
higher dimension, in that it simultaneously contains the entire temporal trajectory
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of three-dimensional space. I will return to that important distinction later in the
Introduction, when I examine physicist Brian Greene’s comparison of Susskind’s
holographic principle to Plato’s cave allegory (2004, 482; 2011b, 272-273). For
now, to restate this crucial point, according to Susskind, our experience of three-
dimensional space is an illusion; reality is encoded on what he calls a two-
dimensional holographic film at the cosmic horizon. An unlikely experiential
confirmation of certain aspects of this idea occurred in 1944, when Jung suffered
a heart attack, during which his consciousness rose out of his body, literally up
into space, a thousand miles above Earth, where he simultaneously lived his past,
present, and future life, which he furthermore felt to be a three-dimensional
illusion hung up to the cosmic horizon by a thread, as he describes in Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, as follows:
For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-
dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat
by himself in a little box. . . . I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it
had come about that I—along with everyone else—would again be hung
up in a box by a thread. (1989, 292)
As outlandish as it sounds, Jung’s NDE is fairly typical of such well-
documented experiences. I examine very similar examples documented by three
distinguished medical doctors: the psychiatrist and pioneer of transpersonal
psychology, Stanislav Grof (2006), in his book, The Ultimate Journey:
Consciousness and the Mystery of Death; the cardiologist from the Netherlands,
Pim van Lommel (2010), in his book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of
the Near-Death Experience; and the Harvard neurologist, Eben Alexander
(2012b), in his book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience
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and Journey into the Afterlife. In his book, Alexander explains that in 2008 he had
a week long NDE triggered by E coli bacteria debilitating his brain. The
otherworldly events converted him from the belief that consciousness is a
biochemical byproduct of the brain, to a belief in the consciousness of a loving
God who permeates each universe in the megaverse. Both Grof and van Lommel
discuss the relation between the holographic paradigm in cosmology and NDE’s,
while van Lommel specifically ties NDE’s to Susskind’s and ’t Hooft’s string
theory version of the holographic paradigm, although he only mentions his fellow
Dutchman, ’t Hooft (2010, 243-245). In Chapter 1 I also examine the central
celestial character Jung experienced during his NDE.
Although his physical body suffering a heart attack was back in bed in his
native Switzerland, Jung’s disembodied consciousness floated approximately a
thousand miles above the curved surface of Earth, directly above Ceylon, from
which point he could see India in the distance. It was at that point that he noticed,
also floating in space, a “black Hindu” sitting in a lotus posture in a brilliantly lit
temple hollowed out from a huge dark stone, like the ones Jung had seen on the
coast of the “Gulf of Bengal” (1989, 290-291). The most famous black Hindu
worshipped along the coast of the Gulf of Bengal is the ultimate “Hindu,” the
form of Vishnu named Krishna (which means “black”).1 Jung met a “black
Hindu” in a temple similar to the ones he had seen on the coast of the Gulf of
1 In her book, A Jasmine Journey: Carl Jung’s travel to India and Ceylon 1937-
1938 and Jung’s Vision During Illness “Something New” Emerging from Orissa,
1944, Evangline Rand (2013) traces out the places Jung actually visited in India,
among which include the most famous temple dedicated to Krishna, the Jagannath
temple in the district of Puri, in the state of Orissa (now known as Odisha), near
the Gulf of Bengal (76).
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Bengal during his out-of-body NDE, his description of which is furthermore
vividly similar to Susskind’s string theory cosmology, which features a
megaverse of bubble universes erupting from the quantum vacuum, each centered
by a transcendental Singularity, and surrounded by a cosmic horizon of
holographic information conservation. Such a cosmological vision warrants a
comparison with the Vedanta cosmology of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas (Vishnu
worshippers).2 That cosmology features three cosmic forms of Vishnu, known as
the Purusha Avatars.
While reading the following verses from Vedic literature, the primary
point to keep in mind is that, according to Jung, the archetypes of the collective
unconscious give form to both myth and science, so that, if Susskind’s string
theory cosmology is rooted to an archetype, it should have some mythological
equivalent (1989, 311). The Vedanta cosmology based on Hindu myth is clearly
structurally similar to Susskind’s cosmology, which indicates that both the Hindu
myth and Susskind’s string theory emerge from the same collective unconscious
archetype. With that in mind I turn to the Bhagavad-gita, where Krishna describes
the eight concentric spheres of elements encompassing each universe in the
megaverse: “Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego—
altogether these eight comprise My separated material energies” (1982, 7.4). In
his purport to his translation of that verse, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
2 The Gaudiya Vaishnavas are sometimes called Bengali Vaishnavas because their
founder, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534), was born in Bengal, formerly
known as Gauda. Gaudiya Vaishnavas are also very prominent in the neighboring
state of Odisha.
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describes the three Purusha Avatars by quoting a verse from the Svatvata Tantra
as follows:
For material creation, Lord Kṛṣṇa’s plenary expansion assumes three
Viṣṇus. The first one, Mahā-Viṣṇu, creates the total material energy,
known as mahat-tattva. The second, Garbhodakaśāyī Viṣṇu, enters into all
the universes to create diversities in each of them. The third,
Kṣīrodakaśāyī Viṣṇu, is diffused as the all-pervading Supersoul in all the
universes and is known as Paramātmā, who is present even within the
atoms. Anyone who knows these three Viṣṇus can be liberated from
material entanglement. (7.4)
According to the Vaishnava school of Vedanta, Maha-Vishnu (Great
Vishnu) sleeps on the Causal Ocean while exhaling and inhaling a megaverse of
bubble universes (brahmandas), each of which is centered on another
transcendental form of Vishnu (Gharbodakashayi), and surrounded by a cosmic
shell (akasha), where the past, present, and future are conserved by strings. Later
in the Bhagavad-gita Krishna says, “O conqueror of wealth [Arjuna], there is no
Truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread”
(1982, 7.7). In the following translation of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1996)
the threaded layer of information conservation at the cosmic horizon, or akasha, is
translated as “space,” although it is sometimes also translated as “ether,” and is
described by Yajnavalkya as follows: “The things above the sky, the things below
the earth, and the things between the earth and the sky, as well as all those things
people here refer to as past, present, and future—on space, Gargi, are all these
woven back and forth” (3:8:1-4). When Gargi asks in whom the timeless, space-
less akasha is woven, warp and woof, Yajnavalkya replies,
‘Pitiful is the man, Gargi, who departs from this world without knowing
this imperishable [Akshara]. But a man who departs from this world after
he has come to know this imperishable—he, Gargi, is a Brahmin.
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‘This is the imperishable, Gargi, which sees but can’t be seen;
which hears but can’t be heard; which thinks but can’t be thought of;
which perceives but can’t be perceived. Besides this imperishable, there is
no one that sees, no one that hears, no one that thinks, and no one that
perceives.
‘On this very imperishable, Gargi, space [akasha] is woven back
and forth.’ (3.8.5-8)
During his NDE, while approaching the black rock temple floating in
space, in which the lotus-postured black Hindu was waiting for him, Jung (1989)
felt convinced that our three-dimensional life is an illusion tethered by a thread to
the cosmic horizon, where past, present, and future are eternally interwoven.
Krishna, the ultimate black Hindu worshipped along the coast of the Gulf of
Bengal, is described as the original form of Vishnu from whom many other
equally potent Vishnu forms radiate, including the three cosmic Vishnu forms:
Paramatma, the Supersoul located in the center of each material and spiritual
atom; Garbhodakashayi in the center of each bubble universe; and Maha-Vishnu,
from whom all the universes bubble forth. A fourth cosmic form of Vishnu is
Krishna’s form as the spiritual thread (sutratman) which not only strings each
atom and universe together like pearls, but which interweaves the past, present,
and future into the cosmic shell (akasha) of each universe. Returning to Jung’s
memory of his NDE, in the following passage notice how he specifically says that
his past, present, and future were “interwoven” into a whole.
It was not a product of imagination. The visions and experiences were
utterly real; there was nothing subjective about them; they all had a quality
of absolute objectivity.
We shy away from the word “eternal,” but I can describe the
experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which the
present, past, and future are one. . . . One is interwoven into an
indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity. (295-
296)
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I argue that the detailed parallels between Jung’s emblematic NDE and
Susskind’s string theory indicate that mind and matter are literally interwoven by
ideal strings at the cosmic horizon, which implies that they must also be united in
the Singularity from which the horizon radiates, the details of which I discuss in
Chapter 2.
Chapter 2
In Chapter 2, “Psyche=Singularity,” I examine Jung’s formulas equating
psychic energy with mass and gravity. On January 17, 1949, Jung wrote a letter in
which he speculates about a possible relation between psychic energy and mass,
as follows:
I start with the formula: E = M, energy equals mass. Energy is not mere
quantity, it is always a quantity of something. If we consider the psychic
process as an energetic one, we give it mass. This mass must be very
small, otherwise it could be demonstrated physically. (1997, 160-161)
On February 29, 1952, Jung wrote another letter linking psychic energy,
mass, and gravity. Contrary to his first hypothesis, which is that psyche must have
very little mass, in the second version he speculates that psyche might transcend
physical measurement because it has infinite mass, an idea he summarizes with
the following equation: “Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space” (1997,
162). The highest intensity of mass imaginable has infinite density, while the
smallest space is zero volume, which is precisely the definition of a gravitational
Singularity in a black hole, and just prior to the Big Bang of our universe, which
Susskind calls an “inside-out black hole” (2008, 438). Therefore, Jung’s equation
can be restated as, Psyche=Singularity. That pivotal equation could help us
14
correlate Jung’s transpersonal psychology and Susskind’s string theory
cosmology, thereby revealing an underlying unity of mind and matter at the
archetypal level, which includes the horizon that necessarily encompasses the
Singularity, thereby forming a geometrically perfect mandala, which I discuss in
Chapter 3.
Chapter 3
In Chapter 3, “Black Hole as Universal Mandala,” I examine the details of
Jung’s theory that the mandala is the empirically observable image of the ultimate
archetype of wholeness via the reconciliation of opposites, which structures both
cosmos and psyche (1989, 334-335). According to Jung, that particular type of
geometrical image spontaneously emerges from the collective unconscious to
compensate a conscious mind that is torn by irreconcilable demands. In the
following passage from Civilization in Transition, Jung describes mandalas.
Mandalas . . . usually appear in situations of psychic confusion and
perplexity. The archetype thereby constellated represents a pattern of order
which, like a psychological ‘view-finder’ marked with a cross or circle
divided into four, is superimposed on the psychic chaos so that each
content falls into place and the weltering confusion is held together by the
protective circle. . . . At the same time they are yantras, instruments with
whose help the order is brought into being. (1964, 423-424)
In Chapter 3 I argue that Jung’s theory of the compensating mandala
image seems particularly convincing in the light of two landmark discoveries in
the history of mathematical physics: George Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 paper
reconciling “real” and “imaginary” numbers (square roots of negative numbers) in
the geometrically perfect mandala of the unit circle on the complex number plane
(formed around the axis of the “real” and “imaginary” number lines at point 0),
15
upon which relativity theory and quantum mechanics were mathematically
conceived; and Susskind’s subsequent mathematical reconciliation of those
infamously incommensurable physics of the very large (general relativity) and
very small (quantum mechanics) in his holographic string theory of black holes
and the Big Bang universe, which are also geometrically perfect mandalas, as I
will explain.
The unit circle is the geometric representation of the positive and negative
square roots of -1, the “imaginary” numbers denoted as i and –i. Multiplying 1 on
the complex number plane by each of the four consecutive powers of i (i, i^2, i
^3, i^4) describes a circle consisting of four 90 degree counter-clockwise
rotations around the axial point, 0: from positive 1 on the horizontal “real number
line” straight up to i on the vertical “imaginary number line,” back down to -1 on
the horizontal real number line, then straight down to –i on the imaginary number
line, then, finally, all the way back up and around to positive 1. Multiplying 1 by
–i raised by four consecutive powers describes a circle rotating in the opposite
direction. 0, the intersecting central point of the real and imaginary number lines,
is the only number that is simultaneously “real” and “imaginary,” while points on
the circumference of the unit circle (except for the four cardinal points that are
directly on the real or imaginary number lines) are called “complex,” because
they are described with a complex of numbers, one real, and one imaginary (thus
we have the complex number plane). In his famous book, A Brief History of Time,
Hawking defines the mathematical concept of “imaginary time” derived from the
square roots of negative numbers:
16
That is to say, for the purposes of the calculations one must use imaginary
numbers, rather than real ones. This had an interesting effect on space-
time: the distinction between time and space disappears completely.
(1996, 133-134)
In a nut shell, Riemann’s geometrical interpretation of the √-1 enabled Einstein’s
discovery of general relativity, and the subsequent discoveries of quantum
mechanics and string theory. Susskind combined all of those theoretical fruits
born from the unit circle to describe black holes, and the inside-out black hole
universe, which, like the unit circle itself, also forms a geometrically perfect
mandala: a central Singularity (a dimensionless point) surrounded by a two-
dimensional sphere (the surface of a three-dimensional ball) that is real from one
reference frame, and non-existent from another. Susskind calls that concept
“Black Hole Complementarity” when applied to the event horizon, and “Cosmic
Complementarity” when applied to the cosmic horizon (2008, 337-440), as I will
discuss later in the Introduction. In a moment I will furthermore examine the
mathematical process Riemann discovered, with which he extended the complex
plane to a point at infinity, creating what is now called a Riemann sphere, which
can be used as a precise map for what astronomers call the celestial sphere, as
Roger Penrose discovered. For now, however, I focus on the more basic
correlation between the unit circle and Jung’s concept of the mandala.
In the following passage from his book, Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of
Two Great Minds (2004), Paul Lindorff explains how Jung saw the concept of
whole numbers as the bridge between mind and matter, and therefore psychology
and physics.
17
From this point of reference, Jung posed the question: what do two
incommensurables like psyche and matter have in common? Jung’s
answer was number. He believed from his dreams and from a myriad of
sources that the common ground between psyche and matter rested in the
mystery of whole numbers, particularly one through four. He saw them as
the simplest and most fundamental of the archetypes, in that they are
directly related to both matter and psyche—to the former mathematically,
to the latter symbolically.
Jung noted that the integers are related qualitatively to the very
structure of the psyche, as well as to stages of consciousness (consider the
Axiom of Maria). But rather than speak of the need to infuse physics with
psychology, Jung believed it was more rewarding to investigate the
commonality upon which the two fields were founded, the archetype of
number. (2004, 160-161)
The archetype of number is the common ground between psyche and
matter, as is the ultimate archetype of the unus mundus, which indicates that the
“one world” is the One. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes the
numbers One and four as follows:
One, as the first numeral, is unity. But it is also “the unity,” the One, All-
Oneness, individuality and non-duality—not a numeral but a philosophical
concept, an archetype and attribute of God, the monad. . . .
The necessary statement of the number four, therefore, is that,
among other things, it is an apex and simultaneously the end of a
preceding ascent. (1989, 310)
Although Jung alludes to imaginary numbers (1966, 80), Pauli, a
preeminent physicist, was powerfully cognizant of the symbolic importance of the
unit circle, which he believed could possibly serve as a bridge across the
descriptive gap between mind and matter. In one particularly impressive active
imagination exercise he experienced, which he later described in a paper, titled,
“The Piano Lesson” (Lindorff 2004, 166-176), Pauli’s anima figure (a piano-
playing Chinese lady who reminded him of his grandmother) took a ring off of
her finger, and let it float in the air in front of her. She said it symbolized “the ring
18
i” of mathematics, which provides a unifying understanding of the relationship
between mind and matter, and which is somehow related to the musical vibrations
of the piano strings, which seems especially pertinent to string theory. In his book,
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and
the Tenth Dimension, Michio Kaku (1994), Professor of Theoretical Physics in
the City College of New York, and co-founder of string theory, explains that:
the laws of physics can be compared to the laws of harmony allowed on
the string. The universe itself, composed of countless vibrating strings,
would then be comparable to a symphony. (154)
Pauli furthermore relates the ring i of the Piano Lesson to the alchemical
axiom of Maria, which he and Jung both relate to the theory of synchronicity, or
meaningful coincidences. In one passage from his book, Synchronicity: An
Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung (1960) cites Pauli as a corroborator in his
proposal to add synchronicity to the three existing parameters of physics—space,
time, and causality—so as to establish a more complete cosmology that unifies
the fields of physics and psychology. Jung assumes that addition would fulfill the
axiom of Maria, which he describes as follows:
The problem that runs like a red thread through the speculations of
alchemists for fifteen hundred years thus repeats and solves itself, the so-
called axiom of Maria the Jewess (or Copt): ‘Out of the Third comes the
One as the Fourth.’ (1973, 96-98)
As discussed above, the four consecutive power of i rotate through right angle
increments in a circle, so that, in line with the axiom of Maria, out of i^1 (which
is 1) comes i^2 (which is -1), out of which comes i^3 (which is –i), out of which
comes the number 1 again as i^4, which furthermore forms a geometrically
perfect mandala. Moreover, the unit circle can serve as the equator of the
19
Riemann sphere, which is even more archetypally similar to a black hole than the
simpler unit circle.
In the Glossary of The Black Hole War, Susskind provides the following
definition: “singularity—The infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole
where tidal forces become infinite” (2008, 455). The Singularity is not a physical
object; it is a space-timeless, ideal point inside an equally space-timeless, ideal
sphere, which Susskind describes as the surface of a solid ball, although he goes
on to explain that, “according to Einstein’s theory, we live in a three-dimensional
analog of a sphere” (2006, 67-68).
According to Einstein’s theory we live in a three-dimensional analog of a
two-dimensional sphere, yet, according to Susskind’s interpretation of string
theory, what we perceive as three-dimensional space is really a holographic
illusion radiating from a two-dimensional sphere at the cosmic horizon. In his
book, The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes,
mathematician and popular author, Rudy Rucker, ties Einstein’s idea of the 3-
sphere back to its mathematical roots in Riemann’s work, as follows:
The surface of a sphere, such as Earth, is an example of a two-dimensional
space that is finite and unbounded. In a famous 1854 lecture, “The
Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundation of Geometry,” Bernhard
Riemann first suggested that something similar is also possible for three-
dimensional space. . . .
Riemann is suggesting here that our space may be a 3-D
hypersurface of a 4-D hypersphere. (1984, 93)
While Riemann and Einstein suggest that our space may be a three-
dimensional hypersurface of a four-dimensional hypersphere, Susskind apparently
reverses that trend by suggesting that the three-dimensional hypersurface is
20
actually a holographic illusion projected from a two-dimensional sphere at the
cosmic horizon. Nevertheless, the holographic sphere of the cosmic horizon
Susskind describes is not two-dimensional in the conventional meaning of that
term, for at least three reasons. First, according to Susskind, the cosmic horizon
contains all of the information that describes the past, present, and future of three-
dimensional space, so it seems more appropriate to call it a higher dimensional
form, despite its being perfectly flat. Second, according to Susskind’s principle of
cosmic complementarity, even that two-dimensional sphere only exists from the
perspective of people inside the cosmos; it recedes from the perspective of those
who physically approach it (2008, 440). Finally, according to Jung’s account of
his out-of-body NDE, the cosmic horizon contains the space-timeless aggregate of
all physical and psychic events, indicating it is a sentient entity in its own right,
and not merely a two-dimensional film. I will return to the confusing question of
how three-dimensional space can be contained in a two-dimensional film when I
examine Brian Greene’s comparison of the holographic principle to Plato’s cave
allegory later in the Introduction (2004, 482; 2011b, 272-273). For now I
emphasize the point that, according to Susskind, our universe is an “inside-out
black hole” (2008, 438), which, as discussed above, is a perfect geometrical
shape. In his book, The Curious History of Relativity: How Einstein’s Theory of
Gravity Was Lost and Found Again, Jean Eisenstaedt explains that,
for essentially mathematical reasons (they are after all mathematical
objects!), black holes cannot have any properties other than mass, charge,
and angular momentum, and these can only manifest themselves through
their gravitational field. . . . Therefore, all black holes are alike and they
are extremely simple objects (if we may say so . . .), at least from a
physical standpoint. (2006, 303)
21
According to Eisenstaedt, a black hole is not a physical thing; it is a
mathematical object, as is the unit circle on the complex number plane, which can
be extended into the Riemann sphere. The following definition comes from
Wikipedia,
In mathematics, the Riemann sphere, named after the 19th century
mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is a model of the extended complex
plane, the complex plane plus a point at infinity. This extended plane
represents the extended complex numbers, that is, the complex
numbers plus a value ∞ for infinity. (Wikipedia 2013b)
The same Wikipedia website provides the following figure (Figure 1).
Fig 1. Riemann sphere A. (Available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere)
In his book, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity,
Cubism, and Modern Thought, Tony Robbin (2006) explains Roger Penrose’s
discovery of how to map the Riemann sphere onto to the “celestial sphere,” as
follows:
As Penrose frequently writes, imagine a viewer looking at the night sky;
the universe of stars appears as a sphere (known as the “celestial sphere”
or “sky map”) in which the viewer is at the center. Another viewer
standing a distance away from the first also sees a celestial sphere. Often,
these two spheres can be brought together simply by rotating one to
22
coincide with the other. If, however, the second viewer is traveling at a
fair percentage of the speed of light, this method will not work; there is a
distortion of the light in the sphere and a simple rotation will not produce
coincidence. For example, if the second viewer passes directly beside the
stationary first viewer but is moving toward the North Star at a great
speed, the stars on the celestial sphere will appear to be squeezed up
toward the north pole; if the second viewer passes by off to the side of the
first viewer, the stars will be rotated to the sides as well as squeezed to the
north. Of course, an application of the Lorentz transformations will
recompute one set of star positions from the other, but Penrose has noticed
that a simpler set of transformations, the Mobius transformations
(unconnected with the Mobius band), will also do the trick. . . .
The complex line, modeled as a plane with only one point at
infinity, rolls up to be a sphere, called the Riemann sphere. For the Mobius
transformations, the celestial sphere is mapped onto this mathematical
sphere. The computations are further simplified if polar coordinates
(derived from angles from the center of the sphere) are used instead of
longitude and latitude coordinates. This change to complex numbers and
polar coordinates turns out to be an unexpected boon. Not only are the
computations of the Lorentz transformations easier to perform, but
Penrose states that computations in general relativity are also easier to
perform. Moreover, complex numbers in projective spaces are the
preferred mathematical system for working in quantum physics; at the
very least these two disparate branches of physics can now use the same
mathematical language. (2006, 74-75)
I am arguing that Susskind’s use of string theory to reconcile general
relativity and quantum mechanics in a black hole falls perfectly in line with
Jung’s theory that the tension of irreconcilable opposites calls forth compensatory
mandala images of the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of
opposites. Moreover, although its gravitational effects are physical, because a
black hole transcends space-time, it is a purely mathematical object. In Chapter 3
I will compare Susskind’s theory of holographic information conservation at the
cosmic horizon of our inside-out black hole universe and Penrose’s similar
attempt to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics by mapping the
23
celestial sphere to the Riemann sphere, which is part of his “twistor theory.”
Keeping string theory in mind, Robbin goes on to explain that:
In the past two years, Edward Witten found a way to combine twistors and
string theory, and through the fusion of these ideas he can do string theory
in the more believable four dimensions instead of string theory’s usual
eleven. (2006, 81-82)
In his book, Visual Complex Analysis, speaking of the correspondence between
the celestial sphere and the Riemann sphere, Tristan Needham, professor of
mathematics from the University of San Francisco, claims that, “Even among
professional physicists, this ‘miracle’ is not as well-known as it should be” (1997,
122-123).
In MDR, Jung points out that, “The properties of numbers are, however,
simultaneously properties of matter, for which reason certain equations can
anticipate its behavior” (1989, 309). It is miraculous to note that, as the equations
of general relativity and quantum mechanics are performed within the framework
of the complex number plane, the physical interactions they model are performed
within the framework of the universe itself, described as a Singularity
encompassed by a celestial sphere, which can be precisely mapped by the
Riemann sphere, which is also called the unit sphere. That there is a predictively
powerful, one-to-one correspondence between the unit sphere of mathematics and
the cosmic sphere where Jung claims that his consciousness merged with the
cosmos during his NDE, strongly supports Jung’s theory that the mandala image
of the archetype of the One forms the bridge that connects cosmos and psyche.
That the physical description of the structure of the universe should reproduce the
geometrical structure of the most basic mathematical tool used to describe it (the
24
unit circle and the unit sphere) raises the suspicion that the physicists’s data is
conforming to the shape of the mathematical lens through which they interpret it.
On the other hand, it could just as well indicate that both the four-dimensional
space-time structure of the universe, and the fourfold structure of the unit circle
used to mathematically describe it, are, respectively, the ultimate cosmic and
psychic manifestations of a more fundamental, underlying ordering principle,
namely, the archetype of Oneness itself, which the alchemist Gerhard Dorn called
the unus mundus. What Needham calls the “miraculous” correspondence between
the relativistic description of the celestial sphere and the Riemann sphere can
furthermore be related to alchemy and astrology, as implied in the following
passage from Jung’s essay, On the Nature of the Psyche.
He [Paracelsus] beholds the darksome psyche as a star-strewn night sky,
whose planets and fixed constellations represent the archetypes in all their
luminosity and numinosity. The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open
book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e.,
the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical
functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.
(1969, 105)
Susskind says that our three-dimensional world is projected by one
dimensional strings from the two-dimensional holographic film at the cosmic
horizon, which means that the temporal forms of the material world radiate from
the timeless forms of the celestial sphere, which indicates that the cosmic horizon
(i.e. the celestial sphere) is functionally equivalent to Plato’s “supercelestial
place” where the eternal forms are stored (Jung 1969, 101). Jung openly equates
his idea of the archetypes of the collective unconscious with Plato’s eternal forms,
or eidos, of the supercelestial place as follows: “‘Archetype’ is an explanatory
25
paraphrase of the Platonic eidos” (1993, 360). In this sense, the holographic
cosmic horizon is functionally equivalent to the collective unconscious container
of the archetypes, which lends credence to Paracelsus’s equation of the star-
strewn celestial sphere with the archetypes from which the cosmos is projected,
which leads to the issue of synchronicity in general, and astrology in particular.
Chapter 4
In Chapter 4, “String Theory and Synchronicity,” I explain that, in
addition to supplying a mathematically rigorous, scientifically plausible
explanation for Jung’s near-death experience of his past, present, and future life at
the cosmic horizon, and in addition to verifying Jung’s theory that the mandala is
the ultimate image of the underlying union of cosmos and psyche, Susskind’s
string theory of holographic information conservation at the cosmic horizon also
supplies a reasonable cosmological framework for explaining Jung’s theory of
synchronicity. Jung’s theory that causally unrelated events can nevertheless be
tied together by a common meaning seems much more plausible in the light of
Susskind’s theory that each event from the past, present, and future of the entire
history of Earth (and every other planet) is literally tied together by fundamental
strings at the level of the two-dimensional film of the cosmic horizon, from which
they are projected inward with the cosmic microwave background radiation (the
echo of the Big Bang) as the holographic movie we perceive as three-dimensional
reality (2006, 341). In short, the two-dimensional film at the cosmic horizon
serves as a universal memory bank and a holographic movie projector, thereby
providing a cosmological locus for where synchronicities could plausibly be
26
orchestrated. Notice the ironic symbiosis: Susskind’s empirically unobservable,
overtly anti-spiritual interpretation of his string theory of the holographic cosmic
horizon provides a scientifically plausible nexus for where NDEs and
synchronicities could originate; while NDEs and synchronicities provide the
empirical evidence that indicates such a cosmic nexus must exist.
My attempt to support Jung’s and Pauli’s theory of the unus mundus by
comparing Susskind’s mandala model of the universe to Jung’s theory of
synchronicity is clearly warranted by Jung’s following claim: “If mandala
symbolism is the psychological equivalent of the unus mundus, then synchronicity
is its parapsychological equivalent” (1977, 464). To support my examination of a
possible link between Susskind’s string theory and Jung’s theory of synchronicity,
I will be citing Roderick Main’s edited work Encountering Jung: Jung on
Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Jung 1997), and David Peat’s (1988) book,
Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter. With the dissertation
chapter summary now complete, I turn to a more thorough summary of the basic
terms and principles of Susskind’s holographic version of string theory, after
which I examine the basics of Jung’s transpersonal psychology.
Basics of Susskind’s String Theory
Unobservable Strings
Susskind (2006) introduces Chapter 9 of The Cosmic Landscape with a
practical example to explain the limits involved with experimentally verifying
string theory. He explains that, as a consequence of basic physical principles, such
as the constancy of the speed of light, and the related fact that it takes increasingly
27
more energy to generate the ever smaller wavelengths of electromagnetic energy
required to measure ever smaller structures in space, we would need an
accelerator the size of the galaxy, and a trillion barrels of oil a second to fuel it, to
observe anything as small as a fundamental string, or even the compactified
dimensions of space around which they are theoretically wound (to be discussed)
(261). Nevertheless, despite a total dearth of empirical evidence, the mathematics
of Susskind’s and ’t Hooft’s holographic interpretation of string theory are
evidently elegant enough for many of the other top physicists in academia today,
including Brian Greene from Columbia University, and Stephen Hawking
himself, to accept it as one of the most likely candidates for reconciling the
otherwise irreconcilable theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
According to Susskind, “That is not a small thing, given the way the two giants—
gravity and quantum mechanics—have been at war with each other for most of
the twentieth century” (2006, 123). I will cite Greene’s helpful comparison of
Susskind’s holographic principle to Plato’s cave allegory (2004, 482; 2011b, 272-
273), and Hawking’s allusion to the same comparison (2010, 44), after I examine
the most basic building blocks of string theory.
In his first book, Susskind summarizes string theory as follows:
A radically new vision of the world made up of one-dimensional threads
of energy, fluctuating wildly out to the edges of the universe, would
replace an older vision of matter made of point particles. (2006, 229)
Susskind’s theoretical fundamental strings are one-dimensional, though they
stretch across the exponentially expanding cosmos to the two-dimensional horizon
(where space is receding, from our point of view on Earth, at the speed of light),
28
vibrating along the way through one dimension of time, and nine dimensions of
space, six of which are curled up, or “compactified,” at every point of three-
dimensional space in twisted, non-Euclidean geometrical shapes called “Calabi
Yau manifolds,” which are six-dimensional, special cases of the more general
class of Calabi Yau spaces (2006, 237). Although our macroscopic-sized bodies
are too large to move in or even directly detect these extra six dimensions of
space, the elastic strings, which are also theorized to be too narrow to measure
(the Planck length), can be mathematically wound around those compactified
geometrical shapes of space in such a way that almost miraculously accounts for
the internal machinery and corresponding quantum mechanics of the fundamental
particles, such as electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and theoretical
“gravitons” (2006, 220-221, 231-238; 2008, 339-346).
To reiterate this most basic point, in his second book Susskind says,
String Theory says that everything in the world is made of microscopic,
one-dimensional elastic strings. Elementary particles such as photons and
electrons are extremely small loops of string, each not much bigger than
the Planck scale. (2008, 293)
He goes on to explain that, as a result of the extremely energetic creation and
destruction of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs constantly occurring in the
quantum vacuum (which causes the exponential expansion of space), the one-
dimensional strings get stretched all the way out to a two-dimensional film at the
horizon of the cosmos (about 15 billion light years away from Earth in every
direction), where all of the information of the past, present, and future of the
universe is timelessly recorded. It is important to note, however, that hypothetical
people on a planet at what we perceive to be the cosmic horizon would also see
29
themselves at the center of the expanding universe, and Earth at the horizon. To
use a common analogy, the same effect can be demonstrated by gluing pennies to
a balloon: as the elastic fabric of the rubber balloon expands, tiny people
inhabiting each penny would perceive their penny as a fixed center, away from
which all of the other pennies would seem to accelerate at a speed that increases
in proportion to their distance (for galaxies, the distance-to-speed ratio is called
the Hubble constant). The crucial detail of Susskind’s version of string theory is
that information is always located at the boundary of any given volume of three-
dimensional space (the ceiling, walls, and floor of a room, the atmosphere of
Earth, the heliosphere of the solar system, the galactic halo, etc.), although when
we approach the boundary, the information seems always to recede out to the next
concentric boundary of our exponentially expanding universe, until reaching the
terminal speed of light at the holographic horizon of the cosmos, on which the
information is timelessly recorded, and simultaneously projected back inward
with the cosmic microwave background radiation (2006, 341).
Information Conservation
Basing his reasoning on the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of
relativity, Hawking previously claimed that because nothing, not even light, can
escape the gravity of the event horizon of a black hole (where the fabric of space-
time is contracting into the central Singularity at the speed of light), anything that
falls past one is permanently removed from the observable universe. If that were
true, Susskind realized, it would violate the most basic physical principle (even
30
more fundamental than energy conservation) of information conservation, which
he describes as follows:
Information conservation implies that if you know the present with perfect
precision, you can predict the future for all time. But that’s only half of it.
It also says that if you know the present, you can be absolutely sure of the
past. It goes in both directions. (2008, 87)
The principle of information conservation is at the heart of the concept of
determinism, according to which the future is just as fixed as the present and the
past. Einstein interpreted his special and general theories of relativity in a
deterministic way, resulting in the idea of a “block universe” in which each event
in the four-dimensional space-time continuum continues to exist simultaneously,
just like slices of bread in a single loaf, as J. B. Kennedy, from the University of
Manchester, explains in his book, Space, Time and Einstein: An Introduction:
In debates over relativity theory, such a world is called the block universe,
because the entire four-dimensional universe, including the past and the
future, seems to be like a giant block of ice: all events in the past, present,
and future coexist and are frozen in their locations in space and time. . . .
Of course, the [metaphorical] loaf [of bread] is only a three-
dimensional object, and the block universe is four-dimensional. Thus
slices of the block universe would each be a three-dimensional world at an
instant: just like the world we see around us now. The series of such three-
dimensional “slices”—past, present, and future—together make up the
whole four-dimensional block. (2003, 53)
In 2011, the PBS television series, NOVA, produced a four part special
based on Brian Greene’s book, The Fabric of the Cosmos. In Episode 2, “The
Illusion of Time,” Greene and other physicists describe the implications of
Einstein’s concept of the block universe, as follows:
BRIAN GREEN [Columbia University]: Once we know that your now can
be what I consider the past, or your now can be what I consider the future,
and your now is every bit as valid as my now, then we learn that the past
31
must be real, the future must be real. They could be your now. That means
past, present, future . . . all equally real; they all exist.
SEAN CARROLL [CIT]: If you believe the laws of physics, there’s just
as much reality to the future and the past as there is to the present moment.
MAX TEGMARK[ MIT]: The past is not gone, and the future isn’t non-
existent. The past, the future and the present are all existing in exactly the
same way.
BRIAN GREENE: Just as we think of all of space as being “out there,” we
should think of all of time as being “out there” too. Everything that has
ever happened or will happen, it all exists, from Leonardo da Vinci laying
the final brushstroke on the Mona Lisa; to the signing of the Declaration
of Independence; to your first day of school; to events that, from our
perspective, are yet to happen, like the first humans landing on Mars. With
this bold insight, Einstein shattered one of the most basic concepts of how
we experience time. “The distinction between past, present, and future,”
he once said, “is only an illusion, however persistent.” (Greene 2011a)
I will return to the fundamental philosophical question of determinism
when I examine the relation between string theory and the wave-particle paradox
of quantum theory later in the Introduction. For now, I skip ahead to the end of
what Susskind calls the Black Hole War. Susskind and his partner, Gerard ’t
Hooft, claim to have saved the principle of information conservation from
Hawking’s assault by using string theory to explain how every bit of information
in any volume of space is actually stored by strings on the holographic surface
area: because the information never actually occupies the volume of the black
hole, it never actually passes the event horizon, and is therefore not erased from
the universe. On the other hand, Susskind and ’t Hoof admit that, from the
perspective of someone who actually follows a bit of information past the event
horizon in order to observe what happens, that bit of information, and the
observer, would indeed be irretrievably lost from our observable universe.
Susskind (2006) makes sense of his string theory of the conservation of
information at the event horizon by an appeal to the “Holographic Principle,” and
32
he calls the theory that information is nevertheless simultaneously lost inside a
black hole “Black Hole Complementarity”; the inside-out version of which at the
cosmic horizon of the universe he calls “Cosmic Complementarity.” However,
before explaining the details of Susskind’s solution to the black hole paradox of
information conservation, it is helpful first to establish a working definition of the
most basic term of all, a bit of information.
What is a Bit of Information?
In a footnote in his first book, Susskind says “a bit is a technical term for
an indivisible unit of information—a yes-no answer to a question” (2006, 332,
n2). Susskind defines the most basic term of his atheistic cosmology in a way that
overtly implies a dialogue between an original cosmic questioner and
corresponding answerer. Who asked the original question required to bring the
original bit of information into existence? And who answered it? In his book,
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, Terrence Deacon, a
professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience at the University of
California, Berkeley, compares the anthropomorphic causative principles
reductionists typically slip into their ostensibly explanatory theories to a
“homunculus.” The homunculus was a small, artificial humanoid supposedly
created by alchemists in the Middle-Ages. According to Deacon, the term,
has also come to mean the misuse of teleological assumptions: the
unacknowledged gap-fillers that stand behind, outside, or within processes
involving apparent teleological processes, such as many features of life
and mind, and pretend to be explanations of their function. (2012, 550)
Susskind’s homunculi are the questioner and answerer implicit in his
definition of a bit of information as “a yes-no answer to a question.” Although
33
evidently also an atheist, unlike Susskind, Deacon attempts the difficult task of
defining information and other apparently non-existent entities (which he calls
“absential phenomena”) as being simultaneously materially emergent and yet,
somehow, not reducible to matter. Although he explicitly rejects the spiritual
interpretations of quantum mechanics and the Singularity of the Big Bang
(theories he dismisses as “panpsychism”), and although he never mentions string
theory directly, Deacon’s attempt to reunite the sciences and humanities with his
theory of absential phenomena nevertheless demonstrates a trend away from
Susskind’s entirely reductionist interpretation of string theory and toward Jung’s
and Pauli’s panpsychic cosmology. My claim is especially warranted by Deacon’s
particular choice of metaphors, such as the following: “Ultimately, we need to
identify the principles by which these unruly absential phenomena can be
successfully woven into the exacting warp and weft of the natural sciences”
(2012, 12-13). Later he writes,
So, if I can coax you to consider this apparently crazy idea—even if at
first only as an intellectual diversion—I feel confident that you too will
begin to glimpse the qualitative outlines of a future science that is subtle
enough to include us, and our enigmatically incomplete nature, as
legitimate forms of knotting in the fabric of the universe. (17)
In this dissertation I am arguing that the future science that is subtle enough to
include a definition of inherently meaningful information, and the psyches that
perceive it, will be a fusion of Jung’s transpersonal psychology and Susskind’s
holographic string theory, according to which the twisted knots of string
constructing the fabric of space-time are ultimately smeared out into a kind of
timeless holographic film at the cosmic horizon, where Jung claims to have
34
objectively experienced his past, present, and future life simultaneously during his
NDE in 1944. In Chapter 4 I argue that what Deacon calls “absence based
causality” (12) can furthermore be equated with a principle Jung (1973 [1960])
describes in his book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. I return
now to Susskind’s homuncular definition of a bit of information.
In his second book, Susskind calls information, “The data that
distinguishes one state of affairs from another. Measured in bits” (2008, 453). If
we accept that everything is made of fundamental strings, then a bit of
information can ultimately be defined as the yes-no answer to a question about the
twists and turns of a string, as Susskind explains: “Imagine moving along the
string as it turns and twists. Each turn and twist is a few bits of information”
(373). Susskind says everything is made of bits of information:
Smaller than an atom, smaller than a quark, smaller even than a neutrino,
the single bit may be the most fundamental building block. Without any
structure, the bit is just there, or not there. (136)
Susskind says that the smallest unit of matter is a bit of information, a yes-
no answer to a question about the twists and turns of a fundamental string. Even if
we ignore the implied need for a question and answer dialogue as part of the
structure of Susskind’s cosmos, there still remains the following question: what is
the difference between an “idea” in the mind and “a bit of information”? With that
question in mind, I turn to the following passage from Ken Wilber’s anthology,
Quantum Questions, where the co-founder of quantum mechanics, Werner
Heisenberg, compares his scientific worldview to Democritus’s material atoms
and Plato’s Ideas.
35
I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato.
For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the
ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato’s
sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the
language of mathematics. Democritus and Plato both had hoped that in the
smallest units of matter they would be approaching the “one,” the unitary
principle that governs the course of the world. Plato was convinced that
this principle can be expressed and understood only in mathematical form.
(quoted in Wilber 2001, 42-52)
According to Heisenberg, quantum theory indicates that the smallest units
of matter are actually “Ideas,” in a Platonic sense, all of which are eternally
situated in a supercelestial realm, the shadow-dream projections of which
constitute our three-dimensional world. According to Susskind, string theory
indicates that the smallest units of matter are bits of information (yes-no answers
to questions about the twists and turns of strings), each of which is eternally
conserved at the holographic cosmic horizon, from which the illusion of our
three-dimensional world is projected. Susskind’s ostensibly anti-spiritual string
theory is essentially identical to Plato’s spiritual theory of eternal Ideas. That
claim is warranted by one of Susskind’s greatest supporters, the noted string
theorist from Columbia University, Brian Greene.
Holographic String Theory and Plato’s Cave
The following passage comes from The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space,
Time, and the Texture of Reality, in which Greene compares Susskind’s string
theory to Plato’s cave allegory:
Is the Universe a Hologram?
A hologram is a two-dimensional piece of etched plastic, which,
when illuminated with appropriate laser light, projects a three-dimensional
image. In the early 1990s, the Dutch Nobel laureate Gerard’t Hooft and
Leonard Susskind, the same physicist who coinvented string theory,
suggested that the universe itself might operate in a manner analogous to a
36
hologram. They put forward the startling idea that the comings and goings
we observe in the three dimensions of day-to-day life might themselves be
holographic projections of physical processes taking place on a distant,
two-dimensional surface. In their new and peculiar-sounding vision, we
and everything we do or see would be akin to holographic images.
Whereas Plato envisioned common perceptions as revealing a mere
shadow of reality, the holographic principle concurs, but turns the
metaphor on its head. The shadows—the things that are flattened out and
hence live on a lower-dimensional surface—are real, while what seem to
be the more richly structured, higher-dimensional entities (us; the world
around us) are evanescent projections of the shadows.
Again, while it is a fantastically strange idea, and one whose role
in the final understanding of spacetime is far from clear, ’t Hooft and
Susskind’s so-called holographic principle is well motivated. For, as we
discussed in the last section, the maximum entropy that a region of space
can contain scales with the area of its surface, not with the volume of its
interior. It’s natural to guess, then, that the universe’s most fundamental
ingredients, its most basic degrees of freedom—the entities that can carry
the universe’s entropy much as the pages of War and Peace carry its
entropy—would reside on a bounding surface and not in the universe’s
interior. (2004, 482)
Greene goes on to give a more robust endorsement of Susskind’s
holographic string theory a few pages later: “Of all the theories discussed here, I’d
pick the holographic principle as the one most likely to play a dominant role in
future research” (2004, 485). In his next book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel
Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, Greene again compares Susskind’s
holographic principle to an inverted version of Plato’s cave allegory (2011b, 272-
273), and furthermore recommends Susskind’s most recent book: “If you’re
interested in the full story, I highly recommend Leonard Susskind’s excellent
book, The Black Hole War” (255). Susskind successfully waged the Black Hole
War specifically against Stephen Hawking, who defers to Susskind’s holographic
principle in his recent book (co-written with Leonard Mlodinow), The Grand
Design, where he also makes an allusion to Plato’s cave allegory, as follows:
37
“And if a theory called the holographic principle proves correct, we and our four-
dimensional world may be shadows on the boundary of a larger, five-dimensional
space-time” (2010, 44). Although, according to Hawking’s interpretation of the
holographic principle, the universe seems to be a four-dimensional bubble
floating in a larger, five-dimensional space-time, the surface (or boundary) of the
bubble, where all of the information is located, is two-dimensional. However, as
discussed above, to call the cosmic horizon two-dimensional merely because it
has no physical depth does not adequately indicate the additional claim that it
contains all of the information we perceive as our three-dimensional world
evolving over time. By absorbing and projecting that multidimensional
information, the cosmic horizon would seem to be more accurately described as a
dimension higher than the third, not lower. That idea becomes easier to
understand in the light of Plato’s cave allegory, to which Greene and Hawking
both compare Susskind’s and ’t Hooft’s holographic principle.
In the cave allegory at the beginning of Book VII of the Republic (514a-
518b), Plato depicts his mentor Socrates asking his interlocutors to imagine
prisoners who are chained head to foot in a subterranean cave at birth, in such a
way that all they ever see are their own shadows cast on a wall in front of them, as
well as the shadows made by facsimiles of natural objects that are carried back
and forth by guards in front of a blazing fire in the back of the cave. According to
Socrates, as the two-dimensional shadows of the prisoners and the puppets that
are projected by the fire in the cave are correlated with the three-dimensional
objects we see on Earth (people, animals, trees, etc.) and in the sky (the planets),
38
which are illuminated by the visible Sun, so too are the three-dimensional forms
on Earth and in the sky (including the visible Sun itself) like dream-shadows of
eternal forms that radiate from the intelligible Sun, also called the “idea of the
good,” the archetype of archetypes which Socrates describes as follows:
In the visible it gave birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible,
itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence—and the man who is
going to act prudently in private or in public must see it. (517c)
Socrates’s definition of the idea of the Good as the ultimate origin and end of
cosmos (visible light) and psyche (intelligible light) is equivalent to the ultimate
archetype of Oneness, which Jung calls the unus mundus, or one world, and
furthermore suggests a direct link to the equation, Psyche=Singularity. A tentative
equation of the idea of the Good with the central Singularity and surrounding
horizon of the cosmos could possibly shed light on a point of confusion regarding
an obvious but apparently inverted parallel between Susskind’s string theory and
Plato’s cave allegory.
We saw above that Greene compares Susskind’s holographic principle to
Plato’s cave allegory in The Fabric of the Cosmos. In his subsequent book, The
Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, he does it
again, as follows:
Two millennia later, it seems that Plato’s cave may be more than a
metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality—not its mere
shadow—may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything
we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that
faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or, really,
a holographic movie. (2011b, 272-273)
In his book, The Fourth Dimension, mathematics professor and popular
author, Rudy Rucker, explains that, according to Plato’s cave allegory, the two-
39
dimensional shadows are cast from three-dimensional objects, the puppets and the
bodies of the prisoners themselves, which “suggests the idea that a person is really
some higher-dimensional soul that influences and watches this ‘shadow world’ of
three-dimensional objects” (88). As Greene points out, however, according to
Susskind’s holographic string theory, our three-dimensional bodies are really
holographic movie projections radiating from a two-dimensional film at the
cosmic horizon, which seems to completely reverse Plato’s cave allegory. On the
other hand, as mentioned above, there is an obvious flaw in calling the
holographic horizon two-dimensional merely because it is perfectly flat,
considering it contains all space and time. The two-dimensional cosmic horizon
described by Susskind is more accurately described as a higher spatial dimension,
in that it simultaneously contains the entire temporal dimension of all three-
dimensional space, and the six dimensions of space compactified in each point
therein. Moreover, as discussed above, people living at the cosmic horizon would
see themselves as the center of the universe, and Earth at the two-dimensional
horizon, so that the Singularity and surrounding horizon are actually different
perspectives of the same thing.
On the one hand, therefore, the cosmic horizon is two-dimensional, which
means, in effect, that it has only one side, a perfectly flat surface with no back
side, which is indicated by the fact that it is impossible to observe the back side of
the cosmic horizon, which recedes as we approach it. Susskind says that every
region of three-dimensional space “has a boundary—not physical walls, but an
imaginary mathematical shell—that contains everything within it” (2008, 299).
40
However, although it is a one-sided, imaginary mathematical shell, the two-
dimensional horizon is simultaneously a higher-dimensional region containing all
lower dimensions of space and the time dimension. The point is that Susskind’s
holographic string theory does not turn Plato’s cave allegory on its head; on the
contrary, it helps us perform the internal rotation of the “eye of the soul” required
to understand Plato’s allegory more precisely, as Socrates explains:
Even so this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of
becoming together with the entire soul . . . until the soul is able to endure
the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. And this,
we say, is the good, do we not? (1991 518c)
Although Susskind claims that every bit of information describing each of
our biographies is eternally conserved at and projected from the cosmic horizon,
he denies that our self-awareness persists there. According to Susskind,
consciousness is merely a biochemical by-product of a three-dimensional brain,
and does not exist in the two-dimensional film at the cosmic horizon, from which
all matter radiates. Susskind illogically uses what amounts to a precise
mathematical description of Plato’s cosmology of eternal Ideas in a universal
Mind to support his own Newtonian-Darwinian version of Democritus’s
materialistic reductionism.
Black Hole Complementarity, Cosmic Complementarity
As discussed above, although Susskind’s holographic principle appears to
be a complete inversion of Plato’s cave allegory, a closer examination indicates
that it actually helps us perform the mental act of perspectival-dimensional
rotation which Socrates says is required to understand the allegory properly. With
that in mind, I turn to Susskind’s thought experiment staring Bob and Alice the
41
astronauts (2008, 363). As Bob, in a spaceship a safe distance from a black hole,
watches Alice fly a propeller airplane toward the event horizon, he sees the
rapidly vibrating strings of which her constituent particles are made gradually
slow down and unravel under the influence of the intensifying gravity, in the same
way that the propellers of an airplane whirling invisibly around the central hub
gradually become visible as they slow down. The quantum string propellers,
however, each have propellers on their ends, which have propellers on their ends,
and so on. Eventually Bob would see all of the information of which Alice is
made smeared out onto a two-dimensional film that covers, but never passes, the
event horizon. Alice, on the other hand, would notice nothing unusual as she flies
freely through the event horizon, although she would eventually feel herself being
ripped apart by the infinite gravity of the Singularity. Two different perspectives
of the same event result in two different events: in one reference frame, Alice’s,
information is irretrievably lost from our universe after it passes the unnoticed
event horizon; in the other reference frame, Bob’s, information never makes it
past the event horizon. Susskind calls this “Black Hole Complementarity” (2008,
237).
Black hole complementarity explains how information is simultaneously
lost and conserved in a black hole, but how is it released back into our observable
universe? According to Susskind, all of the information smeared out just above
the event horizon will be projected back out into the observable universe with the
“Hawking radiation.” Briefly stated, according to quantum theory, underlying
each point of three-dimensional space is a field of infinite energy called the
42
quantum vacuum, that is seething with quantum fluctuations, as Susskind
explains: “Quantum fluctuations are due to virtual photon pairs, which are
created, then quickly absorbed back into the vacuum” (2008, 171). Hawking
radiation, proposed by and named after Stephen Hawking, is theoretically created
when a virtual photon-antiphoton pair appears spontaneously from the quantum
vacuum right on the razor’s edge of the event horizon, so that the antiphoton gets
absorbed into the black hole, while the photon escapes into the universe (giving
the illusion that the black hole is radiating internal heat, and with it, entropic
information). Susskind used string theory to argue that, while the Hawking
radiation is not scrambled information from inside the black hole, it does carry the
scrambled bits of information frozen in time just above the event horizon back out
into the observable universe, like a letter carrier. The same thing happens in
reverse at the cosmic horizon.
Returning to Susskind’s thought experiment, Alice the astronaut would
notice nothing unusual as she floats right past the edge of the universe, while Bob,
watching through a telescope from a safe distance inside the universe, would see
her fundamental string structure slowed down and smeared out across the
infinitely hot cosmic horizon, back in from which it would be projected by the
cosmic microwave background radiation, the echoing afterglow of the Big Bang,
which is equivalent to inside-out Hawking radiation. Susskind calls this inside-out
version of black hole complementarity the principle of cosmic complementarity:
To an observer inside a cosmic horizon, the horizon is a hot layer
composed of horizon-atoms that absorb, scramble, and then return all bits
of information. To a freely moving observer who passes through the
cosmic horizon, the passing is a non-event. (2008, 440)
43
With the concept of cosmic complementarity in mind I turn to the following
footnote in On the Nature of the Psyche, in which Jung quotes Pauli:
It may interest the reader to hear the opinion of physicists at this point.
Professor Pauli, who was good enough to glance through the MS of this
supplement, writes: “As a matter of fact the physicist would expect a
psychological correspondence at this point, because the epistemological
situation with regard to the concepts ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ seems
to offer a pretty close analogy to the undermentioned ‘complementarity’
situation in physics.” (1969, 139)
The principle of complementarity that applies to the holographic cosmic
horizon also applies to the psychological horizon between the conscious and
unconscious, which clearly supports Jung’s theory that cosmos and psyche are
both structured by the same mandala archetype of unity, the unus mundus,
consisting of a central point and surrounding sphere. As I will discuss in more
detail in Chapter 3, in MDR, while describing several dreams that made him
believe that our ego-consciousness is a projection of the collective unconscious
(as opposed to the other way around), Jung says that, “Our basis is ego-
consciousness, our world the field of light centered upon the focal point of the
ego” (1989, 324). If the realm of our ego-consciousness is the field of light
centered on each ego, then the perimeter of ego-consciousness, or, in other words,
the border between ego-consciousness and the collective unconscious, is the
outermost perimeter of the field of light, also known as the cosmic horizon,
where, according to Jung’s NDE account in MDR, the past, present, and future of
the universe, and each sentient experience of it, is eternally interwoven, and from
which each cubic volume of space is projected by a thread. The fact that the
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principle of complementarity applies to Susskind’s theory of the cosmic horizon
that separates our universe from all others, and to Jung’s theory of the psychic
horizon that separates each individual ego from every other, and the underlying
collective unconscious, supports the possibility that the cosmic horizon and the
psychic horizon separating ego-consciousness from the collective unconscious are
one and the same. In one particularly pertinent passage from The Black Hole War,
after explaining that, “It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black
hole” (2008, 438), Susskind admits that we may never be able to observe the
cosmic horizon, which is 15 billion light years away, or any of the information
that exists beyond it. He then addresses the accusation that if something is
“unobservable in principle—it is not part of science . . . it belongs to the realm of
metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism” (2008, 438).
According to Jung, however, the cosmic horizon actually is empirically
observable during an out-of-body, near-death experience, while astrology is a
collectively observable, empirically verifiable form of synchronicity, as he
explains in Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle ([1960] 1973, 114).
In his book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Richard
Tarnas (2006), an expert in the history of Western thought, employs the
techniques of astrology to demonstrate how events historically unfolding through
the Western mind consistently and conspicuously conform to the archetypal
qualities correlated with the concurrent positions of the planets. In the following
passage he explains Jung’s position concerning the link between synchronicity,
astrology, and empirical science:
45
Yet the problem has remained ambiguous, for although coincidences are
often personally significant, they tend to resist objective assessment. Only
if such phenomena were in some sense public and pervasive rather than
private and exceptional—only if the archetypal patternings were more
universally discernible and associated more widely with collective
experience and the world at large rather than sporadically with isolated
special cases—could the suggestion of a deeper order be effectively
substantiated in a way that could influence the cultural world view.
One special, highly controversial class of synchronicities, however,
did appear to resemble this description. In the course of his career Jung’s
attention was increasingly drawn to the ancient cosmological perspective
of astrology, which posits a systematic symbolic correspondence between
planetary positions and the events of human existence. (61)
In this dissertation I analyze two forms of immediately experienced
empirical evidence for the union of cosmos and psyche at the cosmic horizon:
out-of-body experiences of it (during NDEs and other extreme psychological
situations); and the experience of synchronicities, with an emphasis on the
astrological variety. I argue that astrology provides collectively testable empirical
evidence for the theory that there is an archetypally meaningful union of cosmos
and psyche, while a comparison of Susskind’s holographic string theory and
Jung’s NDE indicates that cosmos and psyche unite specifically in the
omnicentric Singularity and surrounding horizon. As I discuss in Chapter 4,
Tarnas’s quest, which is to educate academics and non-academics alike about
archetypal astrology sufficiently enough to enable them to put the theory to a test,
is being carried on by the Journal, ARCHAI, which he helped found, and to which
he regularly contributes.
Continuing in The Black Hole War, Susskind cites the psychological
school of “behaviorism” as an extreme example of the demand for empirical
observation, concluding that, “Perhaps we should simply accept worlds beyond
46
the horizon in the same way that we accept that other people have an impenetrable
interior life” (2008, 439). As if the collective unconscious were coaxing him
toward a more balanced worldview, Susskind directly compares unobservable
universes beyond the cosmic horizon to the impenetrable interior life of human
beings, thereby relating the cosmic horizon to the psychic horizon which separates
our inner from our outer world, which falls right in line with what Jung was trying
to do with Pauli. With that in mind, it is interesting to note Pauli’s historical role
in inspiring the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which includes
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s complementarity principle, as
Heinz R. Pagels explains in The Cosmic Code, as follows:
Is the electron a wave or a particle? Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli in
Copenhagen and many others debated these questions for over a year.
Frustration set in, but Bohr’s persistent optimism kept up a spirit of
inquiry. Finally, by the beginning of February 1927, Bohr was exhausted
and needed a break from Heisenberg, and he took a vacation, collecting
his thoughts. While on vacation, Bohr had a primary insight into the
meaning of the quantum theory. Likewise Heisenberg, in the absence of
Bohr but under the lash of Pauli’s criticism, came to his own interpretation
of the quantum theory. Bohr and Heisenberg each in his own style had
come to new breakthroughs in understanding which were conceptually
equivalent. Heisenberg had discovered the uncertainty principle, and Bohr
had discovered the principle of complementarity. Together these two
principles constituted what became known as the “Copenhagen
interpretation” of quantum mechanics—an interpretation that convinced
most physicists of the correctness of the new quantum theory. The
Copenhagen interpretation magnificently revealed the internal consistency
of the quantum theory, a consistency which was purchased at the price of
renouncing the determinism and objectivity of the natural world. (1982,
69)
The uncertainty principle and the complementarity principle were both
inspired by the attempt to describe the wave-particle paradox revealed by the
famous double-slit experiment. When electrons, photons, or any quantum
47
particles, are directed through two narrow slits at a detector screen, they behave as
either particles or waves, depending on which experimental conditions are used to
measure them. The particles are always detected by the screen as particles.
Moreover, if we use an electron microscope to detect which slit the particles pass
through, they accumulate on the detector screen directly behind the slits in two
narrow bands, just like little bullets would have done had they passed through the
two slits. However, if we do not try to determine which slit the particles go
through, the distribution pattern on the detector screen gradually takes on the
exact same pattern one would see if a liquid wave had gone through the two slits
all at once, splitting itself into two waves, which then collide as they spread
forward, creating a ripple pattern of bright and dark bands spread out across the
whole detector screen: the dark bands corresponding to those places where the
waves cancel out, the bright bands to where the waves amplify each other. For
more detail, I return to Pagels, first to his description of Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle, then to his description of Bohr’s complementarity concept.
What Heisenberg showed was that if two matrices representing different
physical properties of a particle, like the matrix q for the position of the
particle and the matrix p for its momentum, had the property that p x q did
not equal q x p, then one could not simultaneously measure both these
properties of the particle with arbitrarily high precision. . . . A similar
uncertainty relation is found for the uncertainty in the energy, ∆E of a
particle and the uncertain in the elapsed time, ∆t. . . .
An important warning must be stated regarding Heisenberg’s
uncertainty relation: it does not apply to a single measurement on a single
particle, although people often think of it that way. Heisenberg’s relation
is a statement about a statistical average over lots of measurements of
position and momenta. (1982, 69-73)
Pagel’s goes on to explain how Bohr’s complementarity concept
completes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, as follows:
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Particle and wave are what Bohr called complementary concepts, meaning
they exclude one another. . . . Bohr’s principle of complementarity asserts
that there exist complementary properties of the same object of
knowledge, one of which if known will exclude knowledge of the other.
We may therefore describe an object like an electron in ways which are
mutually exclusive—e.g., as wave or particle—without logical
contradiction provided we also realize that the experimental arrangements
that determine these descriptions are similarly mutually exclusive. Which
experiment—and hence which description one chooses—is purely a matter
of human choice. (1982, 75)
The concept of human choice brings up the additional issue of
determinism and the fact that, according to quantum mechanics, it is impossible to
predict the future, because it is impossible to know both the position and
momentum of the particles that make up the present.
Determinism, Relativity Theory, and Quantum Theory
Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity overthrew Newton’s
mechanistic physics, according to which little bits of matter move through three
dimensions of absolute space along a one-dimensional timeline flowing forward
at a constant rate everywhere in the universe. Nevertheless, relativity theory not
only preserves, but amplifies the theory of determinism implicit in Newtonian,
classical physics: not only can the past and future be predicted if we know the
position and momentum of every particle in the present, but the past and the
future simultaneously co-exist with what we call the present. In fact, in Appendix
5 to his book, Relativity: the Special and General Theory, Einstein explicitly
rejects the theory of evolution.
Since there exist in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer
any sections which represent ‘now’ objectively, the concepts of happening
and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated.
It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four
49
dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three
dimensional existence. ([1920] 2001, 152)
Like Plato, Einstein says that reality is more accurately understood as a
four-dimensional, space-time continuum (knowable through higher mathematics),
the deceptive shadows of which appear to us as the evolution of bits of matter
through three dimensions of space and one of time. Susskind explains this concept
as follows:
Thus, there is a fourth direction to space-time: past-future. Ever since
Einstein’s discovery of the Special Theory of Relativity, physicists have
been in the habit of picturing the world as a four-dimensional space-time
that encompasses not only the now, but also all of the future and the past.
A point in space-time—a where and a when—is called an event. (2006,
38)
With that in mind I turn to Sir Roger Penrose, the man who used general
relativity to mathematically verify the existence of Singularities in black holes in
1965 (as I will discuss in Chapter 2). It was that model that Stephen Hawking
time-reversed into the current model of the Big Bang, which Darwinists like
Susskind accept as the starting point of cosmic evolution. In the Introduction
chapter to Richard Feynman’s book on physics, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, Penrose
clearly explains that,
The idea that the history of the universe should be viewed, physically, as a
four-dimensional spacetime, rather than as a three dimensional space
evolving with time is indeed fundamental to modern physics. (1997, xiv)
Penrose provided the mathematics of black holes that Hawking used to describe
the Big Bang, which Susskind accepts as the beginning of evolution in our
universe, though, according to Penrose, who first mathematically proved the
existence of a gravitational Singularity, the perception of the evolution of three-
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dimensional space is illusory from the higher perspective of four-dimensional
space-time.
The theory of determinism finds it logical completion in Einstein’s special
theory of relativity, according to which the past, present, and future are all
simultaneously existing in the block universe. It seemed, however, that
determinism was overthrown by quantum mechanics, to Einstein’s dismay, as
Susskind explains: “Einstein pompously declared, ‘God does not place dice.’
Niels Bohr’s response was sharp: ‘Einstein,’ Bohr scolded, ‘don’t tell God what to
do.’” (2008, 82). Susskind goes on to ask, “does the randomness of Quantum
Mechanics ruin the conservation of information? The answer is weird: it all
depends on whether or not we look at the photon” (2008, 91). According to
Susskind’s complicated explanation, although we cannot simultaneously know the
position and momentum of the particles in the present, and cannot therefore
predict the future, or recall the past, with perfect precision, the information
describing the future and the past is nevertheless timelessly conserved. In short,
according to Susskind’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, the future is
determined, but we can never determine what it is. That may be true, but that does
not mean that we cannot know the future. As I discuss in Chapter 1, during his
near-death experience, Jung felt himself interwoven with all of the information
from his past, present, and future at the cosmic horizon: he did not need to
observe the momentum and position of the particles constituting his present life in
order to determine their position and momentum in the future and the past,
because he had become those future and past particles at the cosmic horizon.
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Megaverse of Universes
The discussion of the wave-particle paradox leads naturally to Hugh
Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Susskind
equates with his own string theory: “I believe the two versions are complementary
versions of exactly the same thing” (2006, 323). In 1957, Everett put forth the
theory that, although a quantum wave of probability seems to collapse into a
single point when it is observed (most likely at the peak of the wave), the wave
never really collapses; rather, each point in every wave of probability bubbles into
a separate, parallel universe, the only difference between them being the position
of that one point in that one wave. The accumulated effect of such microcosmic
differences results in an infinite variety of alternative universes, leading Susskind
to ask, for example, “What if Germany had won World War II?” (2006, 316).
Susskind’s string theory indicates that, although our future, present, and past fate
in this universe is eternally conserved, and therefore determined, at the cosmic
horizon, each alternative we never choose is indeed chosen by some parallel
version of us branching off into the infinity of parallel universes.
Susskind himself describes a “virtually infinite collection of ‘pocket
universes’” (2006, 14), and admits that limiting the number of universes to 1 x 10
to the power of 500 “may not be enough to count the possibilities” (21). If a
Singularity really does have infinite gravity, and therefore infinite energy (as
Penrose, Susskind, and, sometimes, Hawking assume), it makes sense that there
would be no limit to the number of universes bubbling out of it. However,
according to Susskind’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, although the future
52
of each universe is determined, it is impossible to predict precisely which point in
each wave of probability will manifest in which universe. It seems, therefore, that
combining the opposite extremes of general relativity (infinite gravity) and
quantum mechanics (infinitesimal size) results in a string theory that unites the
opposite extremes of determinism and indeterminism in a way that can be
interpreted in the following paradoxical apothegm: at each moment we are forced
by the flow of fate to freely choose from an infinitely expanding array of fixed
futures frozen in time by the infinite temperature at the horizon of each alternative
universe. I will now explain that sentence more fully.
According to Susskind, “as things approach the cosmic horizon, we would
discover that the temperature increases, eventually approaching the infinite
temperature at the horizon of a black hole” (2008, 439). The infinite temperature
explains the timelessness of the cosmic horizon as follows: infinite heat is
equivalent to infinite energy, which, according to Einstein’s equation, e = mc², is
equivalent to infinite mass, and therefore infinite gravity. Susskind explains that,
according to general relativity, like acceleration at the speed of light, so does the
gravity of a black hole stop time: “The closer the clock is to the black hole
horizon, the slower it seems to tick. Right at the horizon, time comes to a
complete standstill for clocks that remain outside the black hole” (2008, 74-75).
The cosmic horizon is an inside-out event horizon, so that, from the perspective of
someone remaining inside the universe, time stops at the cosmic horizon, where,
according to Susskind, every bit of information describing the past, present, and
future of our universe is eternally conserved on an infinitely hot holographic film.
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In conclusion, it seems that at each moment each of us is absolutely free to choose
from an infinite array of pre-determined futures, in such a way, moreover, that all
of the alternatives we do not choose will nevertheless be chosen by some pre-
existing version of us corresponding to the parallel universe in which “we” make
that choice.
The subtitle of Susskind’s (2006) first book, The Cosmic Landscape:
String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, concedes the point that it is
too statistically unlikely that our universe would just spontaneously erupt from the
original Singularity at the Big Bang with all of the physical parameters required
for life (especially the “cosmological constant” that determines the expansion rate
of space) perfectly fine-tuned the way they are, were ours the only universe.
String theory, however, mathematically requires, not only that higher dimensions
of space be curled up in each point of our three-dimensional space, but that our
entire universe of three-dimensional space be only one bubble in an infinite ocean
of bubble universes. According to Susskind, even if there is a finite number of
universes (1 x 10 to the 500), nevertheless, given that preposterously large
number, the ridiculously improbable chance that some of the universes will have
the constants of nature—especially the cosmological constant—perfectly
balanced for life becomes almost inevitable. He relates that idea to the “anthropic
principle,” which he defines in the Glossary of his first book as follows: “The
principle that requires the laws of nature to be consistent with the existence of
intelligent life” (383). The Cosmic Landscape is Susskind’s atheistic explanation
of the anthropic principle, which, he says, was forced upon scientists by the need
54
to account for the exquisitely fine-tuned ratio that describes the expansion rate of
space, known alternately as the cosmological constant, vacuum energy, and dark
energy.
Anthropic Principle and the Cosmological Constant (quantum vacuum)
Chapter 2 of The Cosmic Landscape is titled “The Mother of All Physics
Problems.” Susskind explains that, in 1917, physicists thought the universe was
static: it was neither expanding nor contracting. Assuming that the static model
was correct, Einstein realized that the attractive force of gravity should therefore
be causing the universe to collapse in on itself, unless, as was apparently the case,
it were being counter-balanced by an equal and opposite repulsive force.
According to Susskind, Einstein found room in the equations for his general
theory of relativity for just such an anti-gravitational force, which he called the
“cosmological constant,” and which “he denoted by the Greek letter λ (lambda)”
(2006, 70). In the following passage, Susskind explains that the need for the new
term, the cosmological constant, was apparently nullified by Edwin Hubble’s
discovery, in 1929, that the starry nebulae in outer space were actually
independent galaxies, all of which were accelerating away from our own Milky
Way galaxy at a speed that increases in proportion to their distance (measured by
the Doppler shift interpretation of the red shift of their visible light spectra).
Hubble’s discovery apparently eliminated the need for the cosmological constant
to keep the universe from collapsing into itself. In fact, it offered evidence for
Georges Lemaitre’s 1927 theory that the universe had already been compacted
into a “primeval atom,” from which it exploded at the moment of creation, as
55
Brian Greene explains in his book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and
the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (2011b, 12-13)
When Hubble independently confirmed Lemaitre’s and the Russian
physicist Alexander Friedman’s independent theories about the expanding fabric
of space-time in 1929, Einstein called his previous insertion of the cosmological
constant into his general relativity equations his “greatest blunder” (Greene
2011b, 147,162; Greene 2003a, 82; Kaku 2006, 12, 51, 104). However, referring
to Einstein’s cosmological constant, Susskind says, “But Pandora’s box, once
opened, could not be closed so easily” (2006, 72). Susskind goes on to explain
that, “Einstein’s misbegotten child is nothing but the energy content of the
fluctuating quantum vacuum” (74). Einstein’s cosmological constant—which he
created in 1917, and then rejected in 1929—has subsequently been reincarnated as
the “dark energy” of the quantum vacuum: the anti-gravitational, repulsive force
created by the constant creation and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs (72).
The cosmological constant, Einstein’s rejected stone, has become the corner stone
of current cosmology.
Although Hubble realized that galaxies appear to expand away from each
other at a rate that increases with their distance (like pennies glued to an inflating
balloon), he did not know that the overall expansion rate of the universe is
actually increasing, rather than decreasing, over time. That knowledge was
derived most emphatically from photographs of the cosmic microwave
background radiation taken by the WMAP satellite, which was launched on June
30, 2001, as described on NASA’s (2012) website, as follows:
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The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) was renamed after
the late Dr. David Wilkinson of Princeton University, a member of the
science team and pioneer in the study of cosmic background radiation.
WMAP was decommissioned in October of 2010 after 9 years of flight.
During those 9 years, WMAP helped change how we view our Universe.
WMAP found that today our Universe is made up of 72% Dark
Energy, 23% Dark Matter and only 4.6% Atoms.
WMAP found the age of the Universe is 13.75± 0.13 billion years
old. Known to within 1%.
WMAP found that the Universe was very different when it was
380,000 years old. At that time it was dominated by Dark Matter
(63%), Photons (15%), Atoms (12%), and Neutrinos (10%). Dark
Energy did not exist in measureable quantities at that time. . . .
As WMAP greatly improved knowledge about the CMB beyond
the COBE mission, the recently launched ESA-led Planck mission is
currently collecting data with the expectation to greatly improve the
legacy left by the WMAP mission. The Planck mission measures the CMB
with increased precision and angular resolution compared to WMAP.
(para. 4-5)
The WMAP pictures of the CMB radiation indicate that there is indeed
dark energy emanating from the quantum vacuum, which consists of a sea of
virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that emerge momentarily and then destroy each
other. In the next passage, Susskind explains that, according to quantum field
theory, the quantum vacuum should have an infinite amount of energy. Notice
also how Susskind cites Jung’s partner, Pauli, in defense of the existence of the
quantum vacuum.
There are so many high-energy virtual particles that the total energy
comes out infinite. Infinity is a senseless answer. It’s what made Dirac
skeptical of vacuum energy. But as Dirac’s contemporary Wolfgang Pauli
quipped, “Just because something is infinite doesn’t mean it’s zero.” . . .
Ultimately we reach a value of the energy so large that if two
particles with that much energy collide, they create a black hole. (2006,
75)
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Susskind explains that physicists cannot deal with the infinite energy
associated with black holes in the quantum vacuum, so they just agree to ignore
them:
We call it cutting off the divergences or regulating the theory. . . .
It’s a very unsatisfactory situation, but once we do this we can
estimate the vacuum energy stored in electrons, photons, gravitons, and all
the other known particles. The result is no longer infinite, but it is also not
small. . . . The estimate that quantum field theory gives is so big that it
requires a 1 with 116 zeros after it: 10 to the 116th
power! (2006, 75)
Susskind frankly admits that it is a very unsatisfactory situation to simply
ignore the effects of very high-energy virtual particles which we know exist, but
which we don’t yet understand. The title of this dissertation, Psyche=Singularity,
comes from Jung’s equation relating psychic energy to mass and gravity:
“Psyche=highest intensity in the smallest space” (1997, 162). If, as the
mathematics of quantum field theory indicate, the quantum vacuum does consist
of a boiling sea of tiny black holes (Susskind 2006, 88), and if the Psyche really
can be equated with the Singularity of infinite gravity in the center of every black
hole, then the quantum vacuum is a boiling sea of psyches. To reiterate that
crucial point I turn to an online interview by Joel Pitney in EnlightenNext
Magazine with a cosmologist and professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and
Consciousness graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies,
entitled, “Brian Swimme on Emptiness and the Quantum Vacuum”:
Brian Swimme: I’m coming out of science. So my way of thinking about
this unmanifest realm is that it is actually what in physics we call the
“quantum vacuum,” which was discovered in the 20s. . . . Right now in
this room, there are all kinds of particles that are foaming into existence
and foaming back out of existence. . . .
So the question is: How can you understand an electron going from
one state to another without passing in between [instantaneous quantum
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leap from one electron orbit to another]? . . . David Bohm has a radical
interpretation that has withstood a lot of criticism. He says that when you
have a particle that is in existence, like an electron, the way it goes from
here to there is that it dissolves into the unmanifest. He calls it the
“implicate order.” Quantum vacuum, implicate order, unmanifest—these
are all ways of pointing to something mysterious. It dissolves into that and
then it reconstitutes elsewhere. But it doesn’t reconstitute as the same
particle. When it dissolves, you see, it suddenly floods the entire universe
so that it becomes part of every birthing event in the universe. . . .
At every place in the universe—again, think in terms of the
quantum vacuum—you have this pure generativity, which is infinitely
dense with the possibility of new forms. . . . The universe is all one vast
display that’s flaring forth out of the unmanifest or the quantum vacuum.
It’s incessant vibration in and out. These are ancient spiritual ideas now
resurfacing within science. (2009, para. 3-5)
Notice Swimme’s mention of David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order.
In the following passage from The Essential David Bohm, Bohm compares the
implicate order to a hologram, and calls the incessant vibration in and out of the
vacuum the holomovement: “The implicate order has its ground in the
holomovement which is vast, rich, and in a state of unending flux of enfoldment
and unfoldment” (2003, 93-94). Swimme says that these are ancient spiritual
ideas now resurfacing. Susskind, who claims to have successfully fused quantum
mechanics and general relativity using the holographic principle in a way that
refutes the illusion of intelligent design, conspicuously refuses to mention Bohm’s
pioneering work, almost certainly because Bohm identifies the holographic
principle with ancient spiritual ideas. For example, in Quantum Implications:
Essays in Honor of David Bohm we find the following interview with the
academic philosopher Renee Weber, during which Bohm compares the
holomovement to the Christian Trinity and the Atman-Brahman paradox of
Vedanta philosophy:
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Bohm: We don’t know how far the self-awareness would go, but if you
were religious, you would believe it is a sense of God, or as something
that would be totally self-aware.
Weber: You mean, as a whole. The question is: Is there a significance to
the holomovement as a whole?
Bohm: Yes, that is a question of what proposal we want to explore. People
have, in effect, been exploring notions of that kind in religions. One view
is to say that the significance is similar to ourselves in a sense that
Christians would say that God is a person.
Weber: Or, anyhow, a being.
Bohm: Well, they say three persons, the Trinity, which are one. Anyway,
it is something like a human being, or rather the other way around; that
man is the image of God. That implies that there is a total significance. If
you say Atman, in Hinduism, something similar is implied.
Weber: Atman and Brahman, seen as identical; the micro- and the
macrocosm.
Bohm: Yes, and Atman is from the side of meaning. You would say
Atman is more like the meaning. But then what is meant would be
Brahman, I suppose; the identity of consciousness and cosmos. . . .
This claims that the meaning and what is meant are ultimately one,
which is the phrase ‘Atman equals Brahman’ of classical Hindu
philosophy. (Hiley and Peat 1987, 449)
Returning to The Essential Bohm, in the following excerpt Bohm explains
to Weber that, although the holographic paradigm indicates that there is a union of
consciousness and cosmos, that union does not necessarily indicate the existence
of a personal God:
We’re not saying that any of this is another word for God. I would put it
another way: people had insight in the past about a form of intelligence
that had organized the universe and they personalized it and called it God.
A similar insight can prevail today without personalizing it and without
calling it a personal God. (2003, 147)
Susskind is against all theories about an intelligent ordering principle that
organizes the universe, be it personal, impersonal, or both, which is probably why
he refrains from crediting Bohm, the one physicist who most directly anticipated
Susskind’s own holographic principle. Susskind argues instead that the apparent
presence of intelligent ordering in the universe can be explained by the laws of
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random chance when applied to the practically infinite number of universes he
believes to be bubbling out of the quantum vacuum, which leads to an
examination of Susskind’s explanation of the relation between the vacuum energy
(also known as the cosmological constant) and the anthropic principle.
Returning to Chapter 2 of The Cosmic Landscape, “The Mother of All
Physics Problems,” Susskind explains that, after illegitimately ignoring the
higher-energy virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that would produce black holes
upon colliding in the quantum vacuum, the positive and negative charges of the
remaining kinds of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs almost perfectly cancel out to
zero. Susskind explains that neither quantum theory nor string theory has been
able to explain why so many enormous sets of numbers should cancel each other
out to such a precisely miniscule, but non-zero number: “It truly is the mother of
all physics problems” (2006, 78). To reiterate this important point, according to
Susskind, the need to account for the incredible precision of coincidental
occurrences required at the level of the quantum vacuum to produce precisely the
miniscule quantity that describes the cosmological constant is the ultimate physics
problems. Susskind goes on to explain that the precision of the cosmological
constant forced him to confront the anthropic principle (a term coined by Steven
Weinberg in the mid-1980s). “But if a reason could be found why a slightly larger
cosmological constant would prevent life, then the Anthropic Principle would
have to be taken seriously” (2006, 81).
In The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent
Design, Susskind (2006) admits that the existence of intelligent, biological life
61
requires that the cosmological constant be precisely what it is, no bigger and no
smaller, and he further admits that the exceedingly precise fine-tuning of the
cosmological constant makes it seem plausible at first to suspect that it may have
been the work of some intelligent designer. Susskind’s atheistic explanation for
the anthropic principle, however, appeals to the theory of the megaverse of
parallel universes: a theory that is already inherent in general relativity, quantum
theory, and string theory. In other words, according to Susskind, the megaverse
theory was not artificially concocted just to counter the intelligent design
interpretation of the anthropic principle, although it does provide an atheistic
explanation for it: given enough universes randomly erupting from the quantum
vacuum, the extremely remote chance that some of them will have their physical
constants perfectly balanced for intelligent life becomes inevitable. Even among
atheists, not all physicists agree, as we will see.
In what is called the Smolin-Susskind debate, published in 2004 in the
online science journal, Edge, Lee Smolin (2004), a research professor at The
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, argues against Susskind’s string
theory interpretation of the anthropic principle by saying that the “Anthropic
Principle cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of
science” (para. 1). However, Smolin’s and Susskind’s opinions about why the
universe appears to be intelligently designed to facilitate the evolution of
intelligent life are not fundamentally different: both account for the fine-tuning
required for intelligent life by, first of all, dismissing the possibility of intelligent
design, and, secondly, by assuming some random Darwinian process involving a
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preposterously large number of universes, resulting in a series of lucky hits
required for intelligent life to evolve. In his book, The Cosmic Landscape,
Susskind summarizes Smolin’s viewpoint by saying that, according to Smolin,
baby universes are born inside black holes, the creation of which coincidentally
requires the same physical conditions required for human life, so that, in the end,
“The universe is not tuned for life. It is tuned to make black holes” (2006, 360-
361). How is this passage related to the controversy over the anthropic principle?
Ironically, if Jung’s equation is correct, so that Psyche=Singularity, then Smolin’s
theory that the universe “is tuned to make black holes” is the same as saying that
the universe is tuned to make intelligent life. The Smolin-Susskind debate is a
one-sided affair in the sense that both scientists assume a quasi-Darwinian
explanation for how the constants of nature could be so arbitrarily precise in just
such a way that could result in intelligent life. According to Susskind it is one
unintelligent, random process that accounts for the extremely improbable fine-
tuning of the cosmos; according to Smolin, another random process is involved.
In this dissertation, following Jung and Pauli, I am assembling evidence that
strongly indicates that Susskind and Smolin are both wrong, in the sense that,
whether the universes emerge “randomly” or not, each of them is itself an
eternally intelligent sphere: a mandalic manifestation of the unus mundus. The
universe, which is an inside-out black hole, is not a machine that has been
intelligently designed; it is itself an absolute iota of that infinite intelligence that
bubbles forth freely from the ocean of infinite energy called the quantum vacuum.
With that prelude in place, I will now relate the basic concepts of Susskind’s
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string theory to the basic concepts of Jung’s transpersonal theory of the
archetypes of the collective unconscious, which will lead briefly back through
Immanuel Kant to Plato, who first articulated the great imperative to institute an
academic search for the archetypal principles underlying and unifying cosmos and
psyche.
Basics of Jung’s Transpersonal Psychology
Impressed by the predictive precision of Sir Isaac Newton’s theories of
gravity and light, seventeenth-century empiricist philosophers like John Locke
said that the ultimate source of knowledge should be empirical observation of
nature. In the late eighteenth-century, Immanuel Kant responded by pointing out
that the fundamental concepts of space, time, and causality on which Newton’s
empirical science is based, are not themselves empirically observable. They are,
rather, a priori categories of thought through which the unknowable thing-in-itself
is automatically presented to our conscious mind (Tarnas 1991, 343-346). Jung,
picking up on Plato’s theory of ideal forms in a supercelestial place, called these a
priori categories archetypes of the collective unconscious. Although a self-
described reductionist, in the Introduction to The Black Hole War Susskind
recognizes that the “classical” physics concept of three-dimensional space is not
necessarily inherent to the cosmos, although he argues that “all complex life-
forms have built-in, instinctive physics concepts that have been hardwired into
their nervous systems by evolution” (2008, 4). However, in regard to the
“wholesale breakdown of intuition” that accompanied 20th
century physics,
64
Susskind goes on to say that, “There is no way that evolutionary pressure could
have created an instinctive comprehension of these radically different worlds” (5).
The first false assumption Susskind makes is that humans do not have an
“instinctive comprehension” of the higher-dimensional worlds revealed by
twentieth-century physicists, which totally ignores the striking parallels between
their mathematical model of the universe and mythological cosmologies of the
past, which were pointed out by the founders of relativity theory and quantum
theory themselves, as reported, for example, by Ken Wilber (2001) in his
anthology, Quantum Questions. The ancient cosmologies most frequently cited by
the pioneers of quantum theory are Plato’s Two Worlds theory (featuring the cave
allegory in the Republic), and the Vedanta cosmology of India, featuring a
bubbling megaverse of universes (brahmandas), each centered around a Vishnu
Avatar (Garbhodakashayi), who is inconceivably simultaneously an infinitesimal
particle of infinite intelligence (Atman), an ocean of waves of pure potentiality
(Brahman), and a spiritual string (Sutratman) tying it all together at the spherical
perimeter of each universe (akasha). That the basic concepts of twentieth-century
mathematical physics were anticipated by the religious worldviews of the past
indicates that humans do indeed have what Susskind refers to as an “instinctive
comprehension” of those “radically different worlds” (2008, 5). On this point, see
especially Jung (1989, 300-301).
The second false assumption Susskind makes results from the formal
logical fallacy of circular reasoning. He assumes that an instinctive
comprehension of classical Newtonian physics concepts has been physically
65
hardwired into our nervous system by Darwinian evolution, which places the
effect (Newtonian physics concepts) before the cause (Darwinian evolution). How
could those fictitious survival concepts of classical physics have gradually
evolved from bits of matter moving in three dimensions of space along a one-
dimensional time-line if those false physics concepts were not factually in effect
from the beginning of the universe? In other words, according to Susskind’s
materialist theory of the origin of consciousness, in order for the first living being
to evolve from matter in such a way as to be hardwired to instinctively perceive
the world through the classical Newtonian physics concepts (objectively and
continuously existing bits of insentient matter moving through three dimensions
of absolute space along one dimension of linear time flowing forward everywhere
in the universe at a constant rate), those fictitious yet evolutionarily valuable
concepts must paradoxically have been factually in effect eons earlier, or there
would never have been a temporal process of material evolution to begin with.
Susskind pulls the Newtonian rug of classical physics concepts out from under
Darwin’s feet, yet assumes that the neo-Darwinian theory of the origin and
essence of consciousness still stands.
Notice also that, although Susskind assumes that each species has an
instinctive comprehension of classical Newtonian physics concepts, he never
mentions the unconscious mind in which instinctive comprehension must
necessarily take place, a typical oversight which Jung directly addresses, as
follows:
A discussion of the problem of instinct without reference to the concept of
the unconscious would be incomplete because it is just the instinctive
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processes which make the supplementary concept of the unconscious
necessary. I define the unconscious as the totality of all psychic
phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness. . . . But, over and above
that [the personal unconscious], we also find in the unconscious contents
that are not individually acquired but are inherited, e.g., instincts as
impulses to carry out actions, from necessity, without conscious
motivation. In this “deeper” stratum we also find the a priori, inborn
forms of “intuition,” namely the archetypes of perception and
apprehension, which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic
processes. Just as his instincts compel man to a specifically human mode
of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and
apprehension into specifically human patterns. The instincts and the
archetypes together form the “collective unconscious.” I call it
“collective” because, unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of
individual and more or less unique contents but of those which are
universal and of regular occurrence. (1976, 51-52)
What Susskind calls “instinctive comprehension,” Jung calls archetypes of
the collective unconscious. To review, Jung’s reference to a priori concepts is an
allusion to Kant, who famously pointed out that the fundamental concepts on
which empirical science is based—space, time, and causality—are not themselves
empirically observable; they are, rather, the a priori categories of thought through
which the unknowable thing-in-itself is presented to our conscious minds. In The
Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped Our
World View, Richard Tarnas (1991) explains that the early Jung developed a
quasi-Freudian-Kantian-Darwinian theory according to which the archetypes of
the collective unconscious mind are merely human thought structures
accumulated somehow over the generations through the process of material
evolution. That early phase of Jung’s theory was much more in line with
Susskind’s perspective. In his later years, however, especially after his NDE in
1944, and his subsequent collaboration with Pauli on the theory of synchronicity,
Jung changed his opinion, as Tarnas explains:
67
In his later work, however, and particularly in his relation to the study of
synchronicities, Jung began to move toward a conception of archetypes as
autonomous patterns of meaning that appear to structure and inhere in
both psyche and matter, thereby in effect dissolving the modern subject-
object dichotomy. Archetypes in this view were more mysterious than a
priori categories—more ambiguous in their ontological status, less easily
restricted to a specific dimension, more like the original Platonic and
Neoplatonic conception of archetypes. (425)
For more insight into the relationship between physics and the Platonic-
Kantian-Jungian theory of the space-timeless archetypal categories of space, time,
and causality, I return to Heisenberg. In the following passage from chapter 3,
“Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Outlook,” of his book, Across the Frontiers,
Heisenberg discusses his friend and colleague Pauli’s collaboration with Jung,
which he places in the context of the Western history which led, in his opinion,
from Plato’s theory of Ideas, originally aimed at demonstrating the common
origin of mind and matter, to the conceptual split between them, and the
consequent separation of science and religion (the ultimate expression of which, I
argue, is Susskind’s attack on the theory of intelligent design).
The bridge leading from the initially unordered data of experience to the
Ideas is seen by Pauli in certain primeval images preexisting in the soul,
the archetypes discussed by Kepler and also by modern psychology. These
primeval images—here Pauli is largely in agreement with the views of
Jung—should not be located in consciousness or related to specific
rationally formulable ideas. It is a question, rather, of forms belonging to
the unconscious region of the human soul, images of powerful emotional
content, which are not thought but are beheld, as it were, pictorially. The
delight one feels on becoming aware of a new piece of knowledge arises
from the way such preexisting images fall into congruence with the
behavior of external objects.
This view of natural knowledge is notoriously derived in its
essentials from Plato, and it penetrated into Christian thought by way of
neo-Platonism. . . .
68
Thus the natural science of the modern era involves a Christian
elaboration of the “lucid mysticism” of Plato, in which the unitary ground
of spirit and matter is sought in the primeval images, and in which
understanding has found its place in its various degrees and kinds, even to
knowledge of the word of God. . . .
The elaboration of Plato’s thought had led, in neo-Platonism and
Christianity, to a position where matter was characterized as void of Ideas.
Hence, since the intelligible was identical with the good, matter was
identical with evil. . . .
Platonic thought, originally directed toward the unity of matter and
spirit, leads eventually to a cleavage into the scientific and the religious
views of the world. (quoted in Wilber 2001, 170-172)
Although it can be argued that Heisenberg underemphasizes the
Incarnational core of Christianity and the dualistic tendencies preached in Plato’s
Dialogues, the main point I am interested in in the passage above is Heisenberg’s
claim that the unity of cosmos and psyche is found in the primeval images that
arise from the collective unconscious to the conscious mind (especially when the
latter is painfully stretched between completely opposing demands). In this
dissertation, by way of comparing Susskind’s black hole cosmology to Jung’s
mandala model of the psyche, I am trying to substantiate Jung’s claim that the
mandala is the ultimate primeval image of all primeval images, the image of the
ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, in which is found
the unitary ground of spirit and matter. Susskind’s string theory of holographic
information conservation in event horizons and cosmic horizons is grounded
squarely on the work of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and, though
unacknowledged, of Bohm. Susskind would be the first to admit that.
Nevertheless, he does not comment on the fact that his forbearers unanimously
rejected a material reductionist interpretation of the Newtonian-Darwinian,
evolutionary theory in favor of variations of the Platonic-Kantian-Jungian theory
69
of archetypal forms which transcend the fabric of space-time by virtue of being its
ultimate origin and end (telos). In both of his books, Susskind offers special
respect to Pauli’s contributions to physics. That should be kept in mind while
reading the following passage from an article in the Journal of Consciousness
Studies, entitled, “Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of
contemporary science,” by Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, which
concludes with a quote from Pauli himself.
Central for Jung’s depth psychology is the concept of archetypes. His
understanding of the nature of archetypes matured over nearly half a
century. . . .
Finally, Jung supposed that archetypes generate the underlying
structures of both the psyche and the material world. He used the term
unus mundus to describe the psychophysically neutral, unitary ground
which underlies the duality of mind and matter (Jung 1970, par. 767). . . .
For the concept of the unus mundus it is crucial to understand that
its mental and material domains are neither identical nor completely
separated. In fact they are correlated by the action of archetypal ordering
factors: [Footnote 49: “Letter by Pauli to Fierz of January 7, 1948. Letter
929 in von Meyenn (1993), pp.496-497. Translated by the authors.eit
“The ordering and regulating factors must be placed beyond the
distinction of ‘physical’ and ‘psychic’—as Plato’s ‘ideas’ share the
notion of a concept and of a force of nature (they create actions out
of themselves). I am very much in favor of referring to the
‘ordering’ and ‘regulating’ factors in terms of ‘archetypes’; but
then it would be impermissible to define them as contents of the
psyche. The mentioned inner images (‘dominant features of the
‘collective unconscious’ after Jung) are rather psychic
manifestations of the archetypes which, however, would also have
to put forth, create, condition anything lawlike in the behavior of
the corporeal world. The laws of this world would then be the
physical manifestations of the archetypes. . . . Each law of nature
should then have an inner correspondence and vice versa, even
though this is not always directly visible today.” (2006, 19)
Pauli and Jung developed a theory that there is a mirror-symmetry
between physics and psychology—between the laws of nature and the archetypes
of understanding—because matter and mind both emerge from the same
70
transcendental ground, the psychoid archetypes of the collective unconscious, all
of which emerge from the ultimate archetype, the unus mundus, also known as
God, the One, and the Self. With the intention of continuing that strategy of
pointing out parallels between microphysics and transpersonal psychology, in the
following four chapters I will summarize the four Jungian topics which I claim
are clearly corroborated by Susskind’s string theory: Chapter 1, “Near Death
Experience at the Cosmic Horizon”; Chapter 2, “Psyche=Singularity”; Chapter 3,
“Black Hole as Universal Mandala”; Chapter 4, “String Theory and
Synchronicity”.
339
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