How To Be An Agnostic
summer of 1969 looking out to sea from the beach of Santa
Cruz.
I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon,
watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my
breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole envi-
ronment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance.Capra develops the idea that the language of physics has come
up against the limitations of language when describing reality,
as has long been recognised by the great Eastern mystics. Just
as it is impossible to say what a photon is, only that it is some-
times like a particle, sometimes a wave, so the mystics under-
stood that truly seeing reality is beyond human words and
must be intuited in enlightenment. He believes that science has
developed a new way of probing reality that complements the
older ways of probing reality developed by the mystics.
Physicists explore levels of matter, mystics levels of mind.
What their explorations have in common is that these levels,
in both cases, lie beyond ordinary sense perception. And, as
Heisenberg has taught us, if the perception is nonordinary,
then the reality is not ordinary.Capra’s ideas were and are infl uential. In its latest guise, it is
often referred to as the Universe Story, after the title of a book
by the cosmologist Brian Swimme and theologian Thomas Berry,
The Universe Story. It tells the scientifi c story of the universe,
from the Big Bang to the emergence of human consciousness,
and does so as a new sacred myth. Swimme believes that, as he
puts it, ‘The universe is attempting to be felt.’ Appreciating this
insight leads to an experience of the numinous which Swimme
defi nes as, ‘being shocked by the splendour of existence’.
The Universe Story commands an increasingly large following
and manifests what Gordon Lynch, the sociologist of religion,
has called ‘progressive spirituality’. The progressive element