The idea of matter being frozen light may be difficult to accept for some readers. They will find it even harder to accept the statement made in New Revelation that matter is spirit grown solid or frozen. Yet the inconceivable wisdom of the Creator is not bound by what men consider reasonable. According to Sir Arthur S. Eddington, every true law of nature appears irrational to rational thought." 108 The surprising discoveries made by 20th century scientists exploring astronomic, atomic and subatomic spheres may remind us of what Lichtenberg once said: "What everybody considers agreed needs to be investigated more than anything else."
New Revelation also makes the point: "You cannot see the spiritual, for you are not yet in the spiritual polarity. So it should not be too much of a surprise to you when you find statements here and there in what is reported here that you cannot be clear about ' " (Hi I, p. 46) "Where your scholars sense the presence of natural laws, there indeed none but spiritual life is active and evolving, a spiritual life elevated far beyond all that is tangible, beyond anything the ideas and concepts of your scholars can attain to. And because the spiritual does not submit to their will, they have decided to deny it altogether." (LGh p. 85)
At the time when New Revelation was written, materialistic science was more or less in its beginnings, and materialism spread over the whole earth like a flood.
Metaphysics are taboo in science, and to speak of a Creator when looking for a solution of insoluble problems is considered unscientific. Goethe's words, that the works of nature are always a word first uttered by God, are relegated to the world of poetry. The final conclusion out of wisdom is that the universe and life arose from random chance. But, Professor Viktor von Weizsaecker has asked, "Why should only nonsense, chance, be right, and not sense?" 109 Weizsaecker realized that removing God from the world would also immediately result in removing the spirit from nature." 110 To the east of us, mechanistic, materialistic dogma is anchored in a rigid political doctrine. Unprejudiced research is wellnigh unthinkable there. All theories are based not on scientific interest but ideology; this has precedence over truth.
New Revelation says: "You will not often see My name in print (in the scientific literature, author). They merely delve around in matter, and for the very reason that their search is material they will find nothing but matter." (SGh p. 223) Elsewhere the prediction is made that through materialistic science "an utter absence of faith will arise for mankind." Yet in recent decades it has become very evident that denial of the Creator has brought science to a dead end. With the discovery of the atom and of elementary particles a change has begun. Hopes that science might solve all problems has died. According to the atomic physicist Leonhard Weigand, "our material world is more mysterious than ever when it comes to its final nature." 111 Professor Heinz Haber said that "the stuff of creation is metaphysical by nature and therefore there are limits to what science can determine". 112 "Where is this thing we call matter?" von der Osten-Sacken asks. "Matter dissolves into mathematical concepts." 113 Barnett has expressed the same view, saying that scientists are merely driven deeper and deeper into the dark kingdom of symbols and abstractions.
The mechanical interpretation of natural processes by materialistic scientists had for the first time reached its limits when the nature of light was considered. This would not fit any of the mechanical models. Quantum theory brought an even more radical departure from the graphic qualities of classical physics. The scientific dogma of the steady and continuous state of natural phenomena has been clearly refuted at the atomic level. Everything science has discovered in the physical world points to mysteries beyond the visible world. More and more, as Barnett puts it, all roads based on theory and assumption lead to abysses which the mind of man is unable to bridge." 114 This is why the Nobel Prize Winner Heisenberg said that "All our knowledge hangs suspended above an abyss of ignorance."
Materialistic scientists will one day have to recall the words of Plato, the Greek philosopher who had deeply intuitive faculties and 2300 years ago said: "A truly wise man will aim more to uncover the nature of being ... he will not limit himself to the world of phenomena, the existence of which is mere semblance."
Happily, more and more scientists are coming close to the statements made in New Revelation. Jean Mussard for instance answers the question as to the true nature of matter in very concrete terms: "The major result of this investigation is that it has been established that it is impossible to separate our concepts of spirit and matter. The world of matter appears after all our efforts to be so permeated with spirit, denuded of material reality, that the concept of physical substance has dwindled to nothing. It has dissolved in the transcendental, and in the final instance only abstract mathematical concepts remain." "Nature gives us the clearest possible indication that the world is spiritual in its structure." 115
Paul Chauchard comments: "Every living being is at the same time matter and spirit, with the spiritual element revealing itself not only in the human brain but everywhere in the physical world, proportionate to the degree of organization, complexity and order." 116
R.E. Vestenbrugg says: "Basically, physical matter appears to be approaching a state that is wholly and entirely spirit, and this indicates a high degree of spirituality in the scheme of things" 117 Bernhard Bavink has written: "The world of matter appears to us today as the possibly transient materialization of a wholly spiritual concept." 118
Richard Feynman from the California Institute of Technology (1965 Nobel Prize) has referred to the universe as a hierarchy extending from the simplest atomic structures via most subtle spiritual concepts to recognition of God." 119
According to Sir Arthur Eddington, the reading English astronomer well known for his work in astrophysics, the open confession that in physics one dealing with a world of shadows is one of the most significant advances made in recent times. In his opinion, the substance of the world is the substance of spirit." 120
Sir James Jeans, physicist and astronomer, stated that there is considerable agreement nowadays that the stream of knowledge is flowing towards a nonmechanical reality and that the universe is gradually coming to appear more like a great machine." 121
V.A. Firsoff wrote in 1967: "It is highly illogical to maintain that there is only matter and no spirit. This is far removed from what modern physics is discovering, which is that matter in the traditional meaning of the word does not exist." 122
The discoveries physicists have made at subatomic level have made the mechanistic view of the world an anachronism. Certain elementary particles, the neutrino for example, practically do not have the characteristic of physical properties, so that they are somewhat ghost-like. (The neutrino has no mass, for instance, and no electrical charge, it is not subject to gravity, and "is not captured or repelled by the electrical and magnetic fields of other particles as it passes them.") Some particles seem so strange and ghost-like to scientists that the term 'strangeness' is used with reference to them. These particles, and the "quarks" which have been predicted in theory, may well be the link between spirit and matter. According to the physicist V.A. Firsoff, spirit is a universal entity or interaction of the same kind as electricity or gravity, and analogous to Einstein's famous equation E = C2, there must be a transformation module that makes it possible to equate "spirit substance" with other elements in the physical world. 123 According to Arthur Koestler, Firsoff assumes the existence of elementary particles of 'spirit substance' - suggesting the term 'mindons' for them which might have neutrino-type properties. 124
Arthur Eddington held the view that individual particles of matter behave according to certain laws, and this behavior occurs when matter is in association with spirit. The behavior of this form of matter, he continues, would be in marked contrast to the lawless and random behavior of particles postulated by physicists." 125
Wolfgang Pauli, another Nobel Prize Winner, has written: "With the discovery of Planck's constant, physicists were gradually forced to gave up their proud claim of being able in principle to understand the whole of the world. Yet this very thing may well provide the corrective for former onesidedness and offer the first beginnings of progress in the direction of a uniform concept of the universe, where science is only one limited aspect." 126
Percy W. Bridgman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, has stated that scientists are on the threshold of a new era in human thought." 127
One of the most important physicists in the present age, Max Planck, also a Nobel Prize Winner, said the following, among other things, in a lecture given in Florence: "As a physicist, that is, a man who had devoted his whole life to a wholly prosaic science, the exploration of matter, no one would surely suspect me of being a fantast. And so, having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such. All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom. Yet in the whole of the universe there is no force that is either intelligent or eternal, and we must therefore assume that behind this force there is a conscious, intelligent mind or spirit. This is the very origin of all matter." "Since however there can be no spirit by itself, but every mind or spirit belongs to a being, we must inevitably accept the existence of spiritual beings." "The atoms opens the door for mankind to the lost and forgotten world of the spirit." 128
This significant statement from a famous scientist is in complete agreement with the statements made in New Revelation more than a hundred years ago: "Force as an independent entity, as the learned materialists present it, simply does not exist. The spirit is the initiator of force, the one who holds physical matter together, and therefore the principal factor in all life. Without the spirit there is no life, without life, no physical matter." (LGh p. 78) "Behind this material world is the still larger world of the spirits." (SGh p. 171) "All that has being in reality can in fact only be sought and found in the purely spiritual." (Gr VII 75, 1) In accord with this, the renowned scientist Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker has declared that the substance, the actual nature of the reality we encounter, is spirit." 129
Arthur Koestler draws the conclusion, with regard to the way science is going: "We have heard a whole chorus of physicists who are Nobel Prize Winners tell us that matter, causality and determinism are dead. If that is the case, let us arrange their burial with honors in an electronic requiem. The time has come when we must learn from the post-mechanistic science of the 20th century and get rid of the straight-jacket imposed on our world philosophy by the materialism of the last century." 130
lt is indeed time to overcome materialism. The consequences that have arisen from this have been presented in the last chapter on the disasters that lie ahead. Leading scientists, among them the Nobel Prize Winner Werner Heisenberg, have long since clearly seen a cause-effect relationship in the increasingly more disquietening signs of the times. Heisenberg wrote: "Religion is the basis of ethics, and ethics the precondition for life." "When no guiding principles are left to show the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaningfulness of our actions and our pain, so that the end inevitably must be negation and despair." "These guiding principles derive not from contemplation of the immediately visible world, but the sphere of structures that lie behind it, Plato referred to this as the sphere of ideas, and the Bible says that God is spirit." 131
The time will come when it is realized that materialism is the wrong way. The disclosures made in New Revelation leave no doubt that scientific research findings will come closer and closer to the statements made by Lorber. "My life teaching", the prediction is, "will easily agree with science when it is purified, giving mankind the full light of life." (Gr IX 90, 11)
Lincoln Barnett was clearly right when he said that scientists are aware that posterity may well revise their views, just as they themselves are revising the views of their predecessors." 132