Jacob Boehme Online

Like a modern physicist, Boehme is haunted by the idea of the invariance of the cosmic processes and by the paradoxical coexistence of unity and diversity. All is movement, in a continual creation and annihilation, in a perpetual genesis where nothing is stable and permanent. But this movement is not chaotic or anarchic; it is structured, organized by virtue of an order that is certainly complex and subtle, but nevertheless perceivable. As Boehme says to us continually, "even God is begotten by this movement, he is born not in the world but with the world." The absence of a system of values adapted to the complexity of the modern world could lead us to the self-destruction of our own species. The formulation of a new philosophy of Nature seems to me, in this context, of immediate urgency. Jacob Boehme is among us in this quest: he is our contemporary.

I consider Boehme to be not a precursor to modern philosophy, but a modern philosopher himself. His writings are alive…

There are admittedly (and understandably) few modern scientists who study Boehme. Most notable is theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu, who finds three key elements highly developed in Boehme: ternary thought, thought without image and a template for a Unifying Language that would enable communication between our increasingly balkanized branches of knowledge. Boehme could move from theology to physics to botany to astronomy to psychology to biblical exegesis without changing vocabularies. This vocabulary would not be utile to modern scientists, but the shoemaker's mastery of language is hailed by transdisciplinarians as "a triumph of human thought." Nicolescu does not find any scientific data in JB; what he finds is method, approach and facility of movement between different levels of reality. IN SM&E he writes,

"What interests us in the context of the present book is the emergence of a new form of the imaginal in quantum physics, characterized by the total abolition of image, at least of that which is founded on information furnished by the sense organs. This new form of the imaginal has been engendered by the confrontation between two different levels of reality; the macroscopic level (located at our own scale) and the quantum level. I believe some examples may illustrate the sense of this proposal better than any theoretical development. First of all, the scale at which one discovers the quantum world is, in and of itself, staggering. If one takes one centimeter and then cuts it ten equal parts, and then takes one of those parts and also divides it into ten parts, and finally, continues this operation by carrying it out thirteen times (10^-13 cm), one arrives at the threshold of the quantum world: an infinitely small oddity which, far from being simple, hides infinite complexity. When we fathom even smaller distances, extraordinary surprises await us. For example, the unification of various interactions – strong, electromagnetic, and weak – takes place with a fabulous energy (10¹⁵  times greater than the energy corresponding to the mass of a proton). According to the law of Heisenberg, this energy corresponds to an infinitesimal distance (10^-29 cm): if the proton was as large as the sun, this scale of unification would be that of a speck of dust (I leave to the reader the pleasure of discovering the corresponding proportion of his own body to this speck of dust). The unification of all these physical interactions takes place with an energy still more fabulous (10¹⁹ times the mass of a proton), which corresponds to an even tinier distance. How can we imagine the place where all the interactions fuse in one and the same interaction? How can the habitual imagination, based on information furnished by our sense organs, not feel dizzy contemplating such a scale? And still we must indeed resist this vertigo, if we do not wish our discourse on "reality" to transform itself into pure verbiage, into pure illusion. For this infinitesimal scale has a right to the status of "reality" as much as (if not more than) our own body does, or the objects which surround us in our everyday life.

"In the quantum world the goddess 'discontinuity' reigns. Between two successive energy levels there is nothing – absolutely nothing, no other level of energy. The "quantum numbers" of particles (which are the characteristics of these particles, as our weight, the color of our eyes, etc., are the characteristics of our bodies) have precise, discrete values, and between two successive values of these quantum numbers, there is nothing – absolutely nothing, no other number possible. This discontinuity of which we speak is a true one – it has nothing in common with the meaning of the word in ordinary language (a fork in a road, for example). How can one imagine such a discontinuity? Let us try to imagine a "quantum ladder" where the steps are not in any way connected to each other, and try to imagine ourselves in the process of climbing such a ladder: an obviously impossible request – our habitual imagination instinctively fills in the gaps between the steps. Let us try another image: a bird jumping from one branch of a tree to another without passing through any intermediary point: it is as if the bird materialized suddenly on one branch or another. Evidently, our habitual imagination is blocked when confronting such a possibility, even if mathematics can treat this kind of situation rigorously.

"Numerous other surprises await the voyager in this Valley of Astonishment..."

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 Science, Meaning & Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme 

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BASARAB NICOLESCU'S WEBSITE

INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

REVIEW OF MANIFESTO OF TRANSDISCIPLINARITY by Karen Claire-Voss