Recognizing the existence of different levels of reality

Today's scientific spirit is slowly abandoning a strictly materialistic conception of the world and accepting the reality of a world outside immediate reality. Aside from Jung and the physicist Pauli, numerous researchers, physicists, and philosophers of science have come to the hypothesis of a transcendental field, such as that in the implicate order of David Bohm, the veiled real of Bernard d'Espagnat , and the subquantum field of Ervin Laszlo. The paradox is that physics, which in the positivist XIX century wanted to explain everything on a sole and unique level, has been obliged to consider at least two different levels of reality:

- The reality of macroscopic objects of every day life, governed by the Aristotelian view of identity, non-contradiction and of the excluded middle. In other words, a table is a table and not a chair.

- The reality of quantum objects, already evoked in regards to the phenomenon of non-locality, which is the expression of the universe as a certain, indivisible totality. If we try to understand the behavior of these objects by the means of classical logic, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of paradox. Such is the case of light which was first interpreted as a corpuscle and then, with the XIX century wave theory as a wave, until the emergence of quanta theory in 1930. Since then, we have envisioned light as being made up of novel entities that are both wave and particle. Thus, classical logic, based on the principle of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, must cede its place to the logic of the included middle. This included middle reveals another level of reality where that which appears disunited and contradictory (wave or particle) is perceived as united and non-contradictory. Certain physicists cannot make room for this concept. Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond compares the situation to that of the first explorers who, once disembarked in Australia, "perceived in the streams where they sought gold, strange beasts with beaks and fur which they baptized 'duckmoles.' The Aborigines already had a name for the animal: 'mallingong' (or boondaburra). Unfortunately, this name was replaced by the heavy and scholarly 'ornithorhynchus' (or 'platypus' for the Anglo-Saxons) since the creature was not the combination of a duck and mole, but rather a newly discovered being. Similarly, the physicist who manipulates light with his instruments and describes it in equations sees that in neither case is light wave or particle nor sometimes one and sometimes the other, as is too often said ". We therefore move to a new level of deeper reality where identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle simultaneously disappear.

It is in the framework of these new epistemological landscapes opened by quantum physics that one may situate astrology and determine its eventual connection to science. For this, a new rationality must come into effect - an open rationality which permits dialogue between differing sciences and inner experience. This new approach is taking form under the name transdisciplinarity. The name touches upon the two meanings of the prefix trans: that which is beyond all disciplines and that which traverses all possible disciplines. Article 3 of the Transdisciplinarity Charter specifies that "transdisciplinarity complements the disciplinary approach. Out of the dialogue between disciplines it produces new results and new interactions between them. It offers a new vision of nature and reality. Transdisciplinarity does not seek a mastery in several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to what they have in common and to what lies beyond their boundaries."

Science, with its protocols, demands, and specific means of existence, operates on a completely different level than that of the mind-inspired quest for innerness embodied by astrology. Each decode the same potential unity of the real while working from differing levels of being. In his vast inquiry into the relationship between science and the soul, Michel Cazenave distinguished a hierarchy of four levels of existence between ourselves and Being, helping to demonstrate where and how science and astrology are profoundly united yet totally distinct.

1- The beings or entities : level of the psychology of the conscious and of phenomena that are relatively separate, and studied by classical macroscopic physics. Here dwells the excluded middle (a is a and not b). For example, Mars is the planet Mars and not the planet Venus.

2- The Totality of being : level of the total psyche personified in an individual, of phenomenal relativist physics and phenomenal quantum physics. Particular entities originate from these actual globalities.

3- The plane of Being: realm of the potential totality of the objective transcendental psyche, of the unus mundus, of the real at the roots of quantum physics where paradoxes and complementary pairs are found (conscious-unconscious, wave-particle). The associated logic is that of the included middle (a is at the same time a and b). It is also the place of archetypes and astrological symbols which may signify one thing as well as its opposite. For example, the symbol Mars may be manifest both in the destructive behavior of a serial killer and in the healing hands of a surgeon.

4- The Being: unknowable and imparticipable, beyond all contradiction and all identity as a is neither a nor b.

Astrology, like any symbolic art, draws on the last two levels of the above structure where the objective psyche and matter coincide in their potential unity. Science, for its part, only deals in separate, multiple and actualized objects from the first two levels. But, as Cazenave insists, these four levels are mirrored in each other, the last referring to the first.

Author: Alain Negre