The Zohar predicted an era when “the wellsprings of wisdom below” will burst forth, along with the “windows of wisdom from above,” to prepare the world to enter the seventh millennium. The date it provides, converted to our calendar, is 1840, when the industrial revolution had come into full swing. Interestingly, in that decade there were more discoveries and inventions relative to the number of people in the world than at any time before or after.
But in what way do scientific discoveries prepare the world to enter an era of divine wisdom?
To answer, a closer look at history might help.
The ancient prophets and philosophers understood that somehow all we see and touch must be united by some vast cosmic principle, or by a common life breathing within all of them. But this notion remained the domain of the soul and the mind. When people looked out at the world about them, all but the most enlightened saw a place full of many things, each with its own nature. Water had its nature, fire a different nature, and each animal and plant its own particular way of being.
Isaac Newton was the first great mind to expose that oneness in measurable terms. Seeing the entire universe as a single whole, he discovered fundamental principles—such as gravity, laws of motion, of light, fluids and of thermodynamics—that run through all of nature, from the stars in the sky to the apple that just fell on the ground. Historians call this “the first great unification.”
The second great unification. was in the mid-1800s—the period the Zohar predicted—when James Clerk Maxwell realized that three seemingly diverse forces—electricity, magnetism and light—were really different manifestations of a single dynamic. He called that dynamic the electromagnetic field. To this day, Maxwell’s equations are the basis of everything we do with fields of energy.
Albert Einstein took this train of thought to its next step: In the fall of 1905, he proposed his theory of special relativity. In a footnote to that paper, he inserted a simple equation demonstrating that the two most basic elements of nature, matter and energy—the quantity and quality of all things—are interchangeable. That was the third great unification.
With time and ingenuity, the number and complexity of equations needed to explain universal phenomena became shorter and simpler. Scientists began searching for a unified “theory of everything.” The general consensus of the scientific community is that there must be such a thing, only that our instruments of measurement are not yet powerful enough to find it.
Of course, the wisdom from above has told us this for millennia. Ask the enlightened sages of many peoples and they will tell you: All the multitude of things we see about us is in truth a oneness, because its Creator is a perfect oneness. But if this oneness is truly everywhere, we should be able to see it everywhere—not just in the world of the spirit, but also within the very material world that we can scientifically measure and examine.
Which is just what science is providing for us today. In the words of Einstein himself, “It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.”
Today, we see that oneness through an electron microscope, a laser, a spectrometer, an MRI, a nuclear accelerator and all the other applications of these grand unifications of physics. These are the wellsprings of wisdom from below that the Zohar was predicting. In a time soon to come, our physical eyes will see, openly and naturally, that all is one. In some ways, we are already there.
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