I still recall, with nostalgic tinge, the prayer line we used to recite daily back in my seminary days: “The grandeur of the mountains and the vastness of the oceans, the breathtaking wonder of the interstellar space, all these proclaim the glory and majesty of God!”
No doubt, God has always been a perennial quest and a magnificent obsession for humans. Indeed, it can be said that we’ve been so engrossed in the search of a more or less comprehensible but indisputable evidence or manifestation – never mind how unfathomable – of God’s existence or presence.
In the ancient Vedic tradition, God is Nada Brahma – meaning, the universe is sort of a “sound” and all is vibration. The word Nada means sound of vibration, and Brahma is the Vedic name for God. Brahma, simultaneously is the universe and the creator. Like the artist and the art, they are inseparable.
In Vedic Hindu, the “God principle” is attributed to Akasha, the primordial and encompassing “field” where all information, all experience(s) past-present-future, exist now and always. It is on this field or matrix from which all things arise – from the sub-atomic particles to the galaxies, stars, planets, and all life. Akasha is itself the space which exists simultaneously with vibration. The two are inseparable – Akasha is yin to prana’s yang.
Also in the Hindu tradition, the “God operation” may be equated with Shiva Nataraja, which literally means “Lord of the Dance”. The whole cosmos dances to Shiva’s drum. All is imbued or “ensouled” with the pulsation. Like yin and yang, the dancer and the dance are inseparable.
In Buddhism, one is taught to directly perceive the “God principle” – the field of change and impermanence within oneself – through meditation.
Then in science. Contemporary quantum physics has found out that there is more mass in the universe than it predicted. To account for the missing mass, physicists say that the universe consists of 4 percent atomic or normal matter, 23 percent of dark matter, and 73 percent of dark energy – or what is called the “empty space.” According to Einstein, this empty space is not nothing; it has properties and, intrinsic to the nature of space, it has unfathomable amounts of energy. This empty space, scientists now aver, is like an “invisible nervous system that runs throughout the universe connecting all things.” Could it be that God is the supreme animating principle, if not one and the same as this “empty space?”
Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland in 2012 announced that they had found the Higgs Boson, or the “God particle,” thereby proving scientifically that an invisible energy field fills the vacuum of space. It appears that everything is made of vibration but there is “nothing” being vibrated. It is as if, there has been an invisible dancer, a shadow dancing hidden in the ballet of the universe. All the other dancers have always danced around this hidden dancer. It is as if we have observed the choreography of the dance, but until now we cannot see the dancer, the so-called “God particle,” the properties of the base material of the universe, the heart of all matter which would account for the unexplained mass and energy that drive the universe’s expansion.
But, perhaps the most revealing empirical evidence of the “God principle” immanent in the universe and all life comes from mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s “fractals,” which have been called the “thumbprint of God.” A “fractal” is a rough geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole pattern – a property called “self-similarity.” In a sense, each part has the same statistical character as the whole, or that each part, though limited in view of the whole, possesses the infinity of the whole.
The fractal principle of the self-similarity is manifestly evident in the ubiquitous natural pattern and dynamics of the cosmic “spiral” which is considered the “intelligence or mind of God.” One cannot avoid observing the properties of ‘symmetry, order, intelligence and logic, beauty, self-organization and inter-connectedness” that are common to these “spirals” pervading throughout our natural creation.
This spiral pattern and dynamics can be observed in all natural patterns, physical operations and life processes: from the spiral-patterned galaxies to the ancient geographic spirals on earth; from our weather systems to the spiral vibration of water in our bath tubs; from the logarithmic spirals of snails, spider webs, fossils, sea horses, shells to the pentagonal spiral pattern of star fish, slice of okra, etc.; from the growth spiral of life in plants to the golden mathematical ratio in the arrangement of plant leaves and flower petals; from architectural geodesic dome structures to coral structures, mushrooms, and cabbages; from the spiral flying pattern of birds of prey to the self-assembling character in nano technology; from Jurassic creatures to phytoplankton and simple cellular organisms; from the awe-inspiring pattern of the DNA to our human brain; and many more.
There’s no denying, nature is indeed precise and extremely efficient. Isn’t this the “God principle” at work?
In sum, thus, I am impelled to draw some bottom-line observations:
1. There exists a mysterious force or thread animating all life and things in our universe.
2. The patterns, processes, mechanisms, and dynamics are in common natural order, symmetry, logic or intelligence, beauty, self-organization, and self-similarity.
3. There is singularity and inter-connectedness in all of life and things.
And, one more corollary observation: Much as science has been aggressive in scouring the farthest horizons of our external worlds for evidence, we have yet to explore the deepest reaches of the internal world within ourselves, if only to find God, the primordial principle.
St. Augustine, who lived the first half of his life “looking for God” in his early exploits of “womanizing, drinking, haughty adventures, and even in his prestigious career in Rhetorics or Law,” ended his soul-searching by finding God in himself, exclaiming “Late have I loved Thee, O Lord, and restless is my heart until it rests in thee!”
Truly, apart from the universe, we can find God within us. Just as the dancer and the dance, the artist and the art, the vibration and the space or field, the matter and energy, the physical reality and consciousness, the creator and the created are inseparable, we too cannot and ought not be separated from God.