Mani Lal Bhoumik is an Indian-born American physicist and writer. Enriching and inspirational, his bestseller, Code Name God: The Spiritual Odyssey of a Man of Science, strikes a perfect balance between spirituality and science to explain the deep concepts that seem to be giving shape and meaning to our lives.
Let’s read an excerpt from this book which the author terms as his personal odyssey.
————
After Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, humankind seemed to sink into a slough of despair, sometimes bordering on panic, since we were fearful that we had lost all sense of direction. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, urged people to regard God as an illusion, nothing more. He said our concept of God only symbolized an infantile desire for a father figure, and we should outgrow this desire. Science should replace God, Freud decreed, explaining: “Science is not an illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.”
But science also proved to be a false god, and its worldview left many despondent, among them even the atheistic philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote of “the Godshaped hole in the human head” through which the Creator had been forcibly extracted. From the mind-matter dualism of Descartes to the iconoclasm of Nietzsche and Marx, from the existentialism of Sartre to the counterfeit reality of the Matrix movies, the split between man and maker has long been widening, and many acknowledged that the wedge was Science with a capital “S.” Specifi- cally, classical physics, with its mechanistic view of the cosmos, had cut God from man’s psyche, leaving in its postoperative haste an open wound of spiritual despair, tyranny, and endless war.
The truth is, both spirituality and science are essential to human beings and always have been. Strangely enough, the same scientific method that once compelled us to question the existence of God is now, by way of advanced physics and cosmology, developing evidence that tends to support our age-old belief in a transcendent power.
A sea change has occurred, though many readers of Time may not have oriented themselves yet to a quantum universe: where the same tiny particle may occupy two places at one time or react instantly to events light years away; where the net energy of the cosmos is zero, yet there is more energy in the vacuum of space than in all the stars; where physics is close to proving that material reality emerges from a common source, which I’ll refer to as the primary field. Is this the field where God has been at play all along? Can humankind tune in God’s frequency once again? I believe we can, in part by means of our own quantum leap in consciousness.
The ideas and observations I offer in the following pages surely cannot span the measure of that leap, for your own full participation is essential. Perhaps, though, my story will encourage you to take a further step on life’s greatest journey. (If you are reading this book, you’ve already embarked!)
This is the memoir of my quest for a new kind of faith. It is a faith in which mind and matter entwine, yet it is anchored in the empirical precepts of science. It is a belief system that says directed consciousness can promote spontaneous remission of a life-threatening disease, a personal quantum leap. It embraces a worldview wherein quantum leaps do occur, not just in the atomic and subatomic domain but in human existence itself— be it in the unfolding of an individual life, in a societal change, or in a country’s struggle for freedom.
I will not ask you to accept that view “on faith.” Let me offer a proof of it by way of my own life, starting at the point when I was the least certain of its meaning and value.
——–
