Schrödingers kosmiske Kat

Erwin Schröedinger er på mange måder et interessant bekendtskab. Han modtog nobelprisen i fysik i 1933 for hans arbejde med bølgemekanikken som fik stor betydning for kvantemekanikken, men han er måske mest kendt som manden der lagde navn til et tankeeksperiment indenfor denne del af fysikke kaldet Schrödingers Cat. Han var endvidere en af grundlæggerne af molekylærbiologien, men orindeligt uddannet i botanik og kemi.

Men hvad der derudover er særdeles interessant ved Erwin Schrödinger, var hans stærke optagethed af mystik generelt, og af den non-dualistiske indiske advaita vedanta tradition i særdeleshed. Han fandt tilsyneladende ikke, at denne gamle mystiske tradition stod i et uforsonligt modsætningsforhold til den videnskab han bidrog ganske betydeligt til. Han mente nok snarere at mystikken og videnskaben stod i et komplementaritetsforhold, hvilket forårsagede at han var en smule ydmyg med hensyn til logikkens potentiale for fuldt ud at kunne forstå altings værensgrundlag. I det følgende er det i hvert fald lettere at spore mystikeren end videnskabsmanden.

The Mystical Vision

For philosophy the real difficulty lies in the spatial and temporal multiplicity of observing and thinking individuals. If all events took place in one consciousness, the whole situation would be extremely simple. There would be something given, a simple datum, and this, however otherwise constituted, could scarcely present us with a difficulty of such magnitude as the one we do, in fact, have on our hands.

I do not think that this difficulty can be logically resolved, by consistent thought, within our intellects. But it is quite easy to express the solution in words: the plurality we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, on e of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not multiply that object. We intellectuals of today are not accustomed to admit a pictorial analogy as a philosophical insight; we insist on logical deduction. But, as against this, it may perhaps be possible for logical deduction to disclose at least this much: that to grasp the basis of phenomena through logical thought may, in all probability, be impossible since logical thought is itself a part of phenomena and wholly involved in them; we may ask ourselves whether, in that case, we are obliged to deny ourselves the use of an allegoric picture of the situation, merely on the grounds that isr fitness cannot be strictly proved. In a considerable number of cases, logical thinking brings us up to a certain point and then leaves us in the lurch. Faced with an area not directly accessible to these lines of thought, but one into which they seem to lead, we may manage to fill it in such way that the lines do not simply peter out, but converge on some central point in that area; this may amount to an extremely valuable rounding-out of our picture of the world, and its worth is not to be judged by those standards of rigorous, unecquivocal inescapability from which we started out. There are hundreds of cases in which science uses this procedure, and it has long been recognized as justified.

Later on, we shall try to adduce some support for the basic Vedantic vision, chiefly by pointing out particular lies in modern thought which converge upon it. Let us first be permitted to sketch a concrete picture of an experience which may lead toward it. In what follows, the particular situation described at the beginning could be replaced, equally fitting, by any other; it is merely meant as a reminder that this is something that needs to be experienced, not simply given a notional acknowledgement.

Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all around, with rocks thrusting through them; on the opposite slope of the valley there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock faces touched at this moment with soft rose colour by the last rays of the departing sun

According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while – not long – you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The condition for your existence is almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you, he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you, and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this “someone else” really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father, thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference – the difference between you and someone – when objectively what is there is the same?

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense – that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspects are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so smiple and so clear: Tat twam asi, that is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.”

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable, as she – indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely “some day”: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.