What Is Dark Matter?

January 21, 2008 By Tom

In the next issue of WIE (i.e., the one after the brand new issue soon to be at Borders, Chapters, Whole Foods, and Barnes & Noble stores near you), we’ll be featuring an interview with Joel Primack, one of the pioneers of the theory of “cold dark matter,” the mysterious invisible substance that supposedly makes up a quarter of our universe’s mass (with ordinary visible matter representing a paltry 4%!). I’m currently pulling together an accompanying piece that includes interviews with a number of astrophysicists giving their take on what they think dark matter (and its associated mysterious force, dark energy) might be, and I came across this cool little Scientific American video that explains the basic concept for the uninitiated:

To me, that sounds an awful lot like how Obi-Wan Kenobi described the Force — as an invisible field which “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” But most physicists and cosmologists, steeped as they are in scientific materialism and reductionism, seem to think that dark matter is probably just huge clumps of relatively uninteresting particles (often called “WIMPS,” weakly interacting massive particles), which they’re hoping to detect with the Large Hadron Collider that everyone’s so excited about these days. Still, one physicist I interviewed, Deno Kazanis, suspects that these huge clumps of mysterious particles may turn out to be a bit more structured, intricate, and extraordinary than most people can possibly imagine.

Kazanis believes that the discovery of so-called dark matter may simply represent Western scientists finally tuning in to the vast gradations of “subtle matter” that mystics have been describing for millennia. He outlines this theory in his small book, The Reintegration of Science and Spirituality, a summary of which you can read here. These Kosmic subtle realms, Dr. Kazanis explained to me, have traditionally been said to consist of planes of subtle matter that aren’t visible to our ordinary, normal-matter senses, but which we can directly perceive and experience with each of our subtle bodies that correspond to those particular realms, such as the pranic body, astral body, mental body, etc. Such direct perceptions can occur during out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, meditative states, lucid dreams, psychedelic trips, and perhaps even alien abductions.

It’s a compelling idea — and one which I’ll undoubtedly continue to explore, on this blog and elsewhere, in more depth in the future. Because given what I know of the subtle realms, they’ve got to be somewhere, and if, in a post-metaphysical context, we can stop envisioning them as being somehow ontologically separate and distinct from this normal physical universe, then a whole lot of mysteries might suddenly start making a lot more sense…


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