Falsehood can come with truth from above

The muddle in the middle: The February issue of PhysicsWorld has a review of Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life by Mark Haw, a “brave attempt to write an account of the less flashy physics of the ‘middle world’ [between the very big or the very small] centring on the discovery and explanation of Brownian motion.” What caught my attention was the title of this review, which is also the title of this post.

It reminded me of a line from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:The first and the highest are truth; in the middle there is falsehood, but it is taken between the truth on both sides of it and it draws its being from the truth. ( V. 5. 1.)

Here is how Sri Aurobindo, in his magnum opus The Life Divine, interprets this line: The truth of the physical reality and the truth of the spiritual and superconscient reality. Into the intermediate subjective and mental realities which stand between them, falsehood can enter, but it takes either truth from above or truth from below as the substance out of which it builds itself and both are pressing upon it to turn its misconstructions into truth of life and truth of spirit.

I, for one, find this concept of the middle world more important to explore than the world of Brownian motion, but of course the latter study too has its place. Written by Ulrich Mohrhoff koantum matters tags: Mark Haw Sri Aurobindo Upanishad