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Recently I came across a grotesque self-caricature by cartoonist R. Crumb staring bug-eyed at his own reflection in a mirror. “Is that the universe perceiving itself?!” he cries. “My God! It is!!” (Punctuation his!!) This was Crumb’s not-so-sly sendup of a New Age adage that was perhaps best articulated by Alan Watts, a onetime Episcopal priest turned popularizer of Eastern philosophy. “Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself,” he wrote in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966). “Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
Such statements might sound strange to Western ears, because we view ourselves as existing apart from the universe in which we find ourselves. But in non-dualistic Eastern thought, such as Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism, our sense of separateness is regarded as an illusion. Once the veil is pierced, we discover that we are deeply woven into a universe in the process of becoming aware of itself.
Like many New Age maxims, Watts’ contribution turns out to be age-old. Within the Lurianic tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah, which dates from the 16th century, the universe is a manifestation of God's desire for self-revelation, a way for the Divine to reflect on and experience Its own essence. Before creation, God was Ein Sof — pure being without attributes of any kind. In order for the world to come into being, God underwent a contraction, known as tzimtzum, that made room for everything else. In effect, the universe exists as a kind of mirror that enables God to manifest the infinite within a finite creation. Human beings, who were created in God’s image, had a special role in helping the Divine to realize itself by becoming channels of divine light and helping in the restoration of a divine order (Tikkun Olam).
It has taken a while for science to catch up with mystical Judaism. Einstein, who is most closely associated with relativity, had also opened the door to quantum theory with his observation that light (photons) behaved like both particles and like waves. So which was it? Succeeding generations of theorists pursued the question, concluding that elementary particles remain in an indeterminate state with regard to such measurable qualities as mass, location and velocity until there is an act of observation. This triggers a “wave function collapse” that causes photons and other elementary particles to take on measurable qualities — a phenomenon that physicists refer to as the “observer effect.”
But who is doing the observing? Physicist John Wheeler suggested the observer ultimately may be the universe itself, which he characterized as a “self-excited circuit.” He theorized that we live in a “participatory universe” in which consciousness is not a bystander to physical reality but is an essential element in its formation. In a sense, you could say the universe comes into being because we are here to witness it.*
To say that the universe is perceiving itself is to suggest that it is somehow sentient, even if the actual perceiving is subcontracted to sentient beings such as ourselves. Once we’re talking about some Higher Intelligence, we might as well skip the euphemisms and admit we’re really talking about God — even if God takes the unlikely form of a bug-eyed cartoonist contemplating his own grotesque reflection in a mirror. What might we conclude from all this? If nothing else, we’d have to say God is not without a sense of humor.
*The Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), an Anglican bishop, argued that the material world does not exist independently of our perceptions of it. As he expressed it, ”To be is to be perceived.”
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