Spiral Universe N°87 

 

THE EDITORIAL

The quintessence field

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The idea of energy or force, as the active principle of nature, is fundamental to science. But it is also a conception of the Tradition where this principle embodies the breath or the spirit. It is nothing less than the creative Principle, spreading throughout all nature and which the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has defined as the “quintessence field” at the base of the architecture of the Universe.

 

An invisible field concentrating the vibrational information of all that is, has been and will be. But also support of the consciousness of Man covering the rise of the Three kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal) and the transmutation of duality into Unity, through the descent of the Four elements (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) contained in the fifth: the Aether, weaving of the worlds and nesting matrix of the seed atom.

The more one studies atoms according to the materialist and rationalist approach, the more it becomes evident that they do not constitute, as Isaac Newton had imagined, “the ultimate units made of solid, heavy, hard and impenetrable particles”. They look more like activity structures. Since the 1920s, quantum theory has seen in the constituents of matter (electrons, nuclei and atomic particles) vibrational patterns of activity within fields. As the epistemologist Karl Popper put it, “materialism has transcended itself”.

Thus matter turns out to be strongly condensed energy, transformable into other forms of energy, and therefore into something of the nature of the process, since it can be converted into light, heat and movement. It is also suggested that there is no entity identical to itself persisting across changes in linear time. The Universe now appears, not as an assemblage of things, but as an interactive set of events and processes.

According to the quantum electrodynamic theory expounded by physicist Richard Feynman, virtual particles, such as electrons and photons, appear and disappear from the quantum vacuum field, also called the “zero-point field” that pervades the Universe. This theory has been called a gem of physics because of the extreme accuracy of its predictions, correct to the nth decimal place! The price to pay, however, is to accept the existence of invisible and unobservable particles and interactions as well as that of this mysterious quantum vacuum field.

All electric and magnetic forces are made possible by virtual photons which arise from the vacuum field and then disappear. When you look at a compass, the needle indicating north interacts with the earth's magnetic field thanks to these virtual photons. Likewise when you sit down, the seat supports your buttocks because they repel each other, through an intense phenomenon of creation and destruction of virtual photons between them. When you get up, that activity essentially ceases in the vacuum field, and there you have it, as Sheldrake explains, “big clouds of virtual photons that appear between your soles and the ground, wherever you place the feet!"

All the molecules of our body, the membranes of our cells, all the nerve impulses, depend on virtual photons which come and go from the omnipresent vacuum field. “This void is neither inert nor insubstantial, as physicist Paul Davies points out, but alive with pulsating energy and vitality.” According to current theories, matter itself is an energetic process and its mass depends on interactions with fields that pass through vacuum.

Beyond research, such as that consisting in finding, with the help of billions of euros, in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, the “divine particle” of the Higgs boson, there exists a Vital Force which is at work in living organisms, and which does not belong to the standard known forms of energy. A yogi would speak of prana, an acupuncturist of chi. And this primordial force had a connection with the zero-point energy field, this quantum vacuum field filled with energy and invisible matter, interacting with everything else, according to the universal law of conservation?

 

Marc J. PANTALACCI

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