Wafflehead, very interesting what you say about Baha'i...I have never looked into it and know nothing of it. The first part of what you say sounds like straight forward mysticism....the elements of which are common to all branches of mysticism... but the second part about religion and science needing to be in accord reminded me of what I know about Hinduism. I know that much of our modern mathematics, including calculus, was derived from the Vedic writings.....but something that I found even more fascinating was the connection Werner Heisnenberg had to Vedic philosophy and that it was such a great influence on the work he, Schrodinger and Bohrs did in quantum physics. As a young man Heisenberg spent time in India as a house guest of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was a Hindu writer/poet and was the first ever non-English writer to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. Heisenberg and Tagore discussed quantum theory in light of Hindu philosophy at great length. In 1972 Fritjof Capra met Heisenberg and discussed the parallels between eastern philosophy and quantum physics. Here is what Capra had to say about that meeting:
"I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then [circa 1972], and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter. He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China."
Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel prize for physics with his uncertainty principle.
So I went looking for some more info on the discussions between Heisenberg and Tagore when I stumbled on this one hour lecture by Jay Lakhani, Head of the Hindu Academy, Education Director for the Hindu Council UK and a Theoretical Physicist. He studied for his masters degree under Sir Roger Penrose. I absolutely loved it. He discussed the problems caused by the different world views of different religions, the origins of and problems with the all powerful monotheistic god, he states that Hindus have no problem at all with Darwin but they have a huge problem with Dawkins as he refuses to consider anything outside materialism. He reckons the idea of 11 dimensions and the multiverse is an overly complex abomination that has Occam rolling over in his grave and that this clumsy monstrosity was created so that physicists can avoid the fact that at some point right at the centre of physics we have to let go of materialism.
His views are certainly worth considering and, in my opinion, are no more outrageous than the materialistic view that life started as a couple of molecules growing on the back of a crystal....
