Going Within (29 page)

Stephen pushed a button on his wheelchair and spun it around.

“Come,” he said.

He led me back into his office. I followed him. His nurse followed both of us. He steered his wheelchair to his desk.

“Look at that wall,” he directed. I walked over to what looked like a framed cartoon hanging behind his desk.

Stephen smiled at me. I looked more closely. The cartoonist had drawn caricatures of Hawking and of another scientist named Hartle standing in front of a blackboard plastered with complex equations and
symbols. Intently the two men studied the figures. The caption had Stephen talking. He said, “No doubt about it, Hartle, we’ve mathematically expressed the purpose of the universe. Gad, how I love the thrill of scientific discovery.”

I chuckled at the cartoon and then I turned back to Stephen and said, “Now this would really have been funny if the cartoonist had had you saying, ‘
God
, how I love the thrill of scientific discovery’ instead of Gad.”

I had meant to be casually quippy with my remark but Stephen didn’t take it that way. He looked into my eyes for a good solid minute. Then a beatific expression melted across his face. His fingers began to operate his computer until the mechanical voice said, “The man who did this cartoon may have known my work, but he didn’t know me.”

I felt myself gasp. I didn’t want to trivialize the moment by saying anything. I just gazed at him. Stephen continued to look unwaveringly at me. The gentle intensity coming from him was so moving that I found it almost embarrassing. Then Stephen tapped out a message. “Come here and give me a kiss,” he directed.

I walked over to him and leaned down over his frail body. “Do you have an open marriage?” I teased.

His face beamed. “I expect so,” he answered. “Perhaps we could go to the movies together.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about “regular” subjects. He wanted to know how I made “magic in films” and I wanted to know how he viewed the magic of life. “Same question,” he concluded. “Same pursuit.”

Yet not for a moment did he concede that within himself or me or anyone else lay the secret of universal reality. I didn’t press my twelve-year-old belief. I didn’t have to. For me he was living proof that a childlike sense of wonder nurtured an exquisite sense of inner peace that surpassed all understanding.

He was himself the proof that the harmony he exuded
was
derived from his
own
understanding of the harmony in the universe he had investigated and proved.

I promised I’d take him to my movie when I returned to England. He promised we had a date.

As I left his office I vowed to sustain my twelve-year-old convictions. If he was an example of how that worked, it would seem to be not only the happiest of decisions but probably the wisest and most practical.

CODA

Science and God?

Without beginning, the Law creates.

I
f, as Hawking and many other scientists say, the Big Bang explosion resulted in life as we know it today, then the seeds of all things, ourselves included, were present at the birth of creation, and every scrap of matter and energy and blood and bones and thought present in the cosmos today could be traced back to the origins of the universe from one small subatomic particle of light. That makes us each sparks of the same light. It also makes each of us a hologram of the entire event. The energies that fragmented and separated and multiplied as the young universe expanded and cooled continue to operate in the beating of our hearts and the movements of our bodies, as well as in the alignment and behavior of the stars. We and they—all things and everything are a connected whole. That is the meaning of “We are one.” The evolution of the universe, then, is continuing not only around
us but within us. Our thoughts, our dreams, and our awareness are part of that universe, the physical and the spiritual inextricably bound together.

Science says it owes a great deal to religion and the spiritual point of view. Modern science began with the rediscovery in the Renaissance of the old Greek idea that nature is rationally intelligent. A simple system ruled by a single set of laws. Many physicists are now saying that everything that is or can be, was contained within that first single spark of energy, rapidly expanding and ruled by a single primordial law.

What is that law and where did
it
come from? Are scientists suggesting that everything may come from and return to a dimension and a time and space about which we know nothing?

Of one thing they say they can be certain. That first light-time-spark that created the universe was the first
cause
creating the effect of expansion. The laws of cause and effect then continued to create evolution. But, as Thomas Aquinas pondered, “If we could but find the first effect, we would come closer to finding the first cause … which is God.” How odd that when confronted with proof of supernal power, the main problem should be what to call it!

Science says nothing preceded the spark of light that preceded the universe because it cannot be traced. Mystics say God preceded the spark of light, that God motivated the spark to ignite into matter, that God is a giant consciousness that cannot be measured
or even conceived of because it is, literally, everything.

In the absence of knowledge of the origins of the spark of light, the primary question for science is: how can there be a universe created out of nothing? Why is there
something
instead of
nothing?

There is a prayer I used to read as a child:

Great is God, our Lord. Great is his power, and there is no end to his wisdom. Praise Him, you heaven, and glorify Him sun and moon, and you planets. For out of Him, through Him, and in Him are all things. Every perception and every knowledge.

That prayer was written in the seventeenth century, not by a priest or a mystic, but by an astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws that govern the motion of the planets.

In fact, the founding fathers of modern science—Kepler, Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and Galileo—were, by and large, profoundly spiritual men. They
wanted
to believe in an impeccable harmony. Modern scientific research is now close to proving that all creation is ruled by an elegant and single principle. The Grand Unification Theory. The principle of God light? The principle of beauty? The principle of harmony? They say that the universe operates and evolves according
to the law of cause and effect; that the universe is nonchaotic. It has symmetry and explicable behavior patterns. It is, as Einstein said, “comprehensible.” And it is continuing to expand. Therefore, the comprehension is continuing to expand.

To me this relates to human consciousness and my twelve-year-old theory that I and the universe were one.

Einstein and the American astronomer Edwin Hubbell concluded that the galaxies are not expanding into a space that is already there, but rather that space itself is expanding, carrying the galaxies with it. To use a balloon as an analogy: if I painted dots on the surface of a balloon and then blew it up, I would see each of the dots moving away from one another as the balloon expands. If I put
myself
on one of the dots, Í become the center of the round balloon and all the other dots move around and away from me. If I let the air out of the balloon, all the dots come toward my dot until they form the ground point of zero, where all dots are in one place at one time. If I blew it up again, my dot would be the center of the expansion. Yet, everyone else on any other dot would also experience themselves as the center of the expansion
and
the collapse of the balloon. Every dot, then, and every place on the balloon is the center of expansion. The analogy is that we are each the center of a universe that itself is expanding. We are carried with it, and the more consciously aware we are of the expansion, the more
we are attuned to the acceleration and movement itself. Therefore, the more aware we are of ourselves, the more aware we are of the universe
because
, as the expanding balloon proves,
from the beginning
we
each are the universe before and after it expands.

What is the center of the universe? Every place is the center. Who is the center?
Everyone
is the center. Where is God? God, and the energy from which all has been created, is in everything, because we have all inherited that first instant in time when it first began.

Here we are, then, alive in space with the memory, on some level, of having been born about fifteen billion years ago. We can’t see our past, but we can
feel
it. It is a part of our consciousness. It is a part of our physicality. It is our heritage. It is who we are. It is where we have been, and where we are going.

By looking at nature on a scale of subatomic structures of matter and energy and the fundamental forces that govern the behavior of subatomic particles, we see that they are each reflecting particles of light. Light that reflects a grandeur and a beauty and an extraordinary power that from the beginning created what we now call human history, and indeed the history of the cosmos. From a single kernel of light particle comes everything there is: the hydrogen, the helium, the photons, atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons. Science and physics and Stephen Hawking have traced the universe back to a time when it was about ten to the minus thirty-fifth of a
second old. The explosion just after the countdown contact of “nothing” moving on to “something.” What went before is the mystery.

Perhaps as we “go within” ourselves we will sense the answer to that “something.” Perhaps that is indeed the riddle. We have been looking outside for the answers. Perhaps they have resided all along in the vast interior of our own individual consciousness, which
knows
it is somehow attached to the grand motivator. The inspiration of science itself has come from the spiritual belief in one God—one Source. Perhaps Alex Orbito and Gasparetto and Mauricio have simply attuned themselves to a more refined knowledge of their source, and we are each capable of such physical phenomena if we integrate the spiritually intuitive memory of who we really are. Perhaps
that
was what I was seeing in Stephen Hawking’s eyes and could describe it with no other word but
love.
Maybe the more we go within ourselves with love, using the techniques and age-old procedures of color and energy and sound, the more we simply remember who we are and come away enlightened with the truth that
we were all there at the beginning.
We are therefore one. We are each therefore part of God. We are each therefore
naturally
harmonious, and our individual recognition of that harmony is in direct ratio to how deeply we recognize and accept the God within ourselves. With that profound realization perhaps we can trust the loving and well-ordered magic of who we are meant to be and get out of our own way and create our lives accordingly.