Back to: The Hermetic Laws & Quantum Physics
Module 1: Practices, Assessments, and Discussion Post
Practices: Dual Reading and Dialogue with the Founders
This course pairs every module’s intellectual content with a practice intended to ground the ideas in direct experience. Module 1 offers three practices. You do not have to do all three. Pick the ones that speak to you. The first is the one I would most encourage, because it rewards the careful attention this material deserves.
Practice 1: The Dual Reading
Duration: two to three hours, ideally in a single sitting or spread across one weekend.
Find a copy of Poimandres, the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. Brian Copenhaver’s scholarly translation (Cambridge, 1992) is the standard. G. R. S. Mead’s 1906 translation is in the public domain and available online. Read the full treatise slowly, without pausing to analyze. Let the strangeness of its visionary imagery register. Poimandres recounts a revelation received by the narrator from the Mind of the Sovereignty, a vision of the creation of the cosmos from light and darkness, and a meditation on the nature of mind, the descent of souls into bodies, and the return to the divine source. It is a text from the first three centuries of the common era, written in Greek in Roman Egypt. It does not apologize for its strangeness. Sit with it.
Then find Chapter 4 of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? or the corresponding chapter of My View of the World, whichever is easier for you to obtain. Read Schrödinger with the same slow attention. He is writing in the twentieth century, in English translation from German, with the full toolkit of European philosophical precision. But what he is describing has a striking structural kinship with Poimandres. Both are claims about the unity of consciousness, the illusory character of apparent plurality, and the possibility of direct recognition of the one.
Now sit, for fifteen to thirty minutes, in silence. Do not try to produce any conclusion. Let the two texts be in you together. Notice what surfaces.
Then, and only then, write. Three to five pages in your own hand or at the keyboard. Describe what the two texts did in you when held together. Where do they converge? Where do they diverge? What interpretive moves would be required to make them compatible? Which text feels closer to your own experience of reality? Why? Is there anything that feels genuinely new in the juxtaposition, something that neither text alone gave you?
This practice is the quiet engine of the whole module. If you do nothing else in Module 1, do this.
Practice 2: Build the Timeline
Duration: 60 to 90 minutes.
On a single large page (blank paper, a whiteboard, or a digital drawing tool), build a timeline from 1900 to 1990. Mark on it, with care:
Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis (1900)
Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper (1905)
Bohr model of the atom (1913)
Schrödinger’s earliest Vedantic notes (1918)
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1927)
Bohr’s Como lecture on complementarity (1927)
Schrödinger’s first draft of My View of the World (1925-1926)
Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World (1928)
Heisenberg’s meeting with Tagore in Calcutta (October 4, 1929)
Pauli’s first meeting with Jung (1931)
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper on quantum entanglement (1935)
Bohr’s 1937 visit to China
Bohr’s coat of arms with the taijitu (1947)
Jung and Pauli publish Synchronicity and the Archetypal Hypotheses of Kepler (1952)
Pauli dies in Zurich hospital room 137 (1958)
Bell’s theorem (1964)
Bohm first meets Krishnamurti (1961)
Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975)
Wheeler’s delayed-choice paper (1978)
Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
First laboratory confirmation of delayed-choice experiment at Maryland (1984)
Wheeler’s “It from Bit” paper at Tokyo (1989)
Now step back and look at what you have built. Which events cluster? Where are the gaps? What patterns emerge when you see the scientific and the contemplative events on the same timeline? Write half a page reflecting on what the timeline shows you that a list would not.
Practice 3: Letter to a Founder
Duration: 90 minutes.
Choose one of the seven physicists profiled in Section 2. Read at least one primary source by that person (Schrödinger’s My View of the World, Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Wheeler’s autobiographical Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, or a selection from the Pauli-Jung correspondence, for example).
Then write a letter to that person. Not as a modern admirer offering praise, but as a careful reader responding to the specifics of what they wrote. Where do you find their argument persuasive? Where do you resist it? What question would you ask if you could? What would they say in response, based on what you know of them?
This practice is more demanding than it sounds. It forces you to engage with the primary sources in the voice of genuine dialogue rather than in the voice of secondary summary. It also teaches a skill that is essential for the rest of this course and for any serious intellectual life: the ability to read a thinker well enough to disagree with them intelligently.
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Assessment
Comparative Analysis Essay
Choose one physicist from Section 2 (Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Bohm, Wheeler, or Eddington) and analyze the relationship between their scientific work and their philosophical or spiritual commitments. Your essay must address all three of the following questions:
First, what are the specific scientific contributions of the figure you have chosen? You must demonstrate that you understand the physics, not only the philosophy. A paragraph or two giving the technical picture in plain English will suffice.
Second, what were their documented engagements with wisdom traditions, philosophy, or contemplative practice? You must cite primary sources where possible (the figure’s own writings and letters) and scholarly secondary sources (the biographies and specialist studies listed in Section 11). Avoid relying on popularizations and websites.
Third, and this is the core of the essay, how did the philosophy and the physics relate in this person’s life and work? Did the philosophy shape the physics, did the physics shape the philosophy, or did both shape each other? Be specific. Use the three-level framework from Module 0 to classify any convergences you identify. An essay that simply concludes “they influenced each other” without specifying how, when, and to what extent, will not receive full credit.
Discussion Post
Address the following question in a cohort discussion post and then engage substantively with at least two other students’ posts. Is the convergence between ancient wisdom and modern physics best understood as evidence of a deep truth about reality, or as an example of confirmation bias at work? Argue both sides.