Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Krishnamurti's major theological contention could be summarized by his statement "Truth is a pathless land," the belief that the angelic, or the divine, or the transcendent, or the absolute must forever be inaccessible to logical language, that no route can bring the initiate to that kingdom, and so the only means of approaching it is poetic rather than rational. At a 1929 address in the Netherlands, Krishnamurti proclaimed, "Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized ... A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect to be imposed on others... Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it." Just as quantum mechanics posits that all sorts of truths about the universe —say, the exact location or velocity of an individual particle —must remain ambiguous and are only decided upon by the arbitrary intercession of the observer, Krishnamurti describes something similar about the divine. Despite his training in Theosophy, such beliefs are perfectly consistent with many interpretations of Eastern religions, but they're also congruent with the idealist mystical belief that the universe only exists if it's being observed, and that God and his retinue are always doing the observing. Both Krishnamurti and Bohm were radical monists, believing in one substance, but rather than matter that substance was mind. The conclusions of quantum mechanics-demonstrated by mathematics and proven by experimentation-were disturbing to physicists who had been trained in the static model of Newtonian science; that some results seem to require consciousness appeared anathema to them. Yet the numbers were what the numbers were, the observations and experiments revealed what they had. On some level, there was a wisdom to assuming that the counterintuitive logic of quantum theory implied that consciousness permeated existence, as that would be the only way to make any sense of such strange results. As Bohm would audaciously declare in an essay published in 1987 in the collection Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm, "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind."

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon

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