The New Physics, Meher Baba, Don Stevens, & The New Humanity I
By Laurent Weichberger, Flagstaff, AZ, July 12, 2009
am sitting in my backyard, in a grassy area at a glass table. Beyond the grassy area there is a ring of large stones, and native Arizona soil with scattered sprigs of grass, various tufts coming up from the hard dry brown earth, now sprinkled with pine needles. Because we have a sprinkler system, the oval remains green, while the water doesn’t reach beyond the stone ring. Our son, Cyprus, loves to play in this grassy area, especially in the sandbox at the edge of the grass. In the middle of the oval is a smaller stone ring filled in with topsoil. Each summer we plant flowers and herbs here (time permitting), and I enjoy seeing Marigolds flourish before the winter snows return. This backyard landscaping was accomplished by the woman who owned this house before we started renting it. She has since passed away. We never met her, yet we benefit from the peace and the view from the yard into the pine forest beyond the yard. In 2002, I had the good fortune to meet Don Stevens, a close disciple (Mandali) of Avatar Meher Baba. We worked together
on a book titled: Meher Baba’s Word & His Three Bridges. Don and I share a deep interest in the sciences including chemistry, physics, and mathematics, although his math skills are definitely superior to my own. In 2007, I made a friend at work, Stephen, who begifted me with a copy of
The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, by Gary Zukav. In both books we find extraordinarily profound subjects which require contemplation and analysis to fully comprehend the meaning of each chapter. After years of living between these two streams of conscious sharing (as presented in these two books), I am inspired to intermingle these living waters. This essay will explore what I find existing between the spirituality of Meher Baba, as expressed by Don Stevens to us in person, and the revelations of physics as distilled so beautifully by Zukav. I believe that the concepts discussed here are applicable to any spiritual tradition, as the scientific principles are universally true, regardless of the path the spiritual aspirant has chosen. Throughout
this writing, I will speak mainly from my own experience of Meher Baba’s words and teaching, since I have chosen his path. The three main points of interest for me right now are the following cases: 1. Niels Bohr won a Nobel Prize for his work (in 1913) explaining the correlation between elemental spectrography and “electron shells.” Electron shells was his way of explaining the position of any given electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom. The gist of his thesis was that electrons “absorb” energy (as light or heat) and then use that energy to “jump” to an “outer-shell” (meaning further from the nucleus than their current position). This absorption of energy by an atom happens automatically, and the electron only absorbs a certain amount of the available extra energy, not all of it. Because this “excited” state (after having absorbed this extra energy) is unsustainable, the electron(s) then discharge the absorbed energy as a release of light, and thereby return to the “ground state”
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