[not2too]

A Koan:
If nobody ever asked, "What is the TOE?" would there be a TOE?

The ToeQuest is an infinite game, a never ending story which unfolds in our narrative universe, our dream-state, our bubble of reality. A mad tango with the One and Only…flirtation…seduction…seeming conquest…abandonment…just to begin again. An vast game of hide and seek with the Source.

A whirling undulation to the mad gypsy violins (and their vibrating strings!) of The Carnival…The Masked Ball, at which we are all unmasked at midnight!

Since "we" are really God playing a multitude of characters and we are the ones trying to figure out the TOE, this Theater Of Everything is actually God playing…feigning ignorance of what's happening...forgetting the game as part of the game. Physical Theories Of Everything will change, evolve with our instruments and devices. It has been said that if we look for a new subatomic particle, for instance, the universe will accommodate us and serve one up. It has been said that science is like fashion, changing from season to season. Science is a mytho-poetic story which will change as belief systems change. The Crack In The Cosmic Egg… as Robert Anton Wilson said, "Reality is what you can get away with…"

“Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.”
Alan Watts

We are Don Quixote-like in our pursuit of the TOE. Tilting at TOEs instead of windmills. Our quest is like a quest for the Grail into the slippery sliding quicksand swamps of our "rock solid" physical reality… like trying to tie down a greased pig…it constantly gets away from you.

In The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age, John Horgan discusses not only the supposed demise of belief in the scientific project, but also the end of the effectiveness of scientific method for accounting for the nature of things and producing a Final Theory. Most practicing scientists think this is hogwash and still believe that, indeed, a Final Theory is possible.

"Final" theories will be approached, scientists will continue to probe with ever more powerful tools and, invariably, the universe will oblige, serving up ever smaller, further away and more bizarre discoveries which will, invariably, result in either re-thinking the "Final" Theory or throwing it out altogether in favor of something new.

As Albert Camus said in The Myth Of Sisyphus in 1942:
"You describe this world to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. I have the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art."

"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry."
Neils Bohr

Maybe we need an aesthetics of the TOE instead of an equation.

So, is a TOE possible? Yes…but not via the sciences. The universe is ultimately unfathomable and known only to God, who has also created the game in which scientists are unwitting characters actually being "played" by God. So what kind of TOE can we know? A paradoxical one…"fleshed out" and agreed upon in our consensus reality, but presented from the non-dual perspective. One in which consciousness is primary.

I know that many ToeQuest members want equations, but if our "physical reality" - dreamstate - samsara, etc. is an illusion, a fiction, then any TOE based on physics will also be a fiction…will it not?

Further...
not2too