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In his essay, The World as I See It, visionaryphysicist Albert Einstein writes, “The mostbeautiful experience we can have is the mys-terious. It is the fundamental emotion thatstands at the cradle of true art and true sci-ence.” Today, a mystery of unprecedentedmagnitude is boggling scientists worldwide,as they seek to understand the phenomenonthey call dark energy. Writing for The Guard-ian, Stuart Clark explains, “An overwhelm-ing majority of astronomers… believe in theexistence of dark energy – and by extensiona root and branch re-working of modernphysics.” Though, he says, “the questionof what this energy actually is remains com-pletely unanswered.”

According to researchers, dark energyand dark matter constitute a whopping 95per cent of what the Universe is made of.Dark energy is dark, meaning it does notmake up the visible stars and planets. It’salso too weak to be measured, but its accu-mulation over billions of light years rendersits effects visible. While it had been knownsince the 1920s that the universe is con-tinuously expanding, Clark explains that theeffects of dark energy first came to light in1998, when two independent studiesshowed that the expansion of the universewas accelerating, indicating the presence ofan undefined force pushing galaxies apart.Scientists had expected to observe expan-sion from the enormous energy created bythe original Big Bang, but they had theor-ized that the braking effects of gravity would

be slowing it down. Their observations thatthe expansion of the Universe was acceler-ating came as a shock.

So what is actually known about thismysterious force? Irish Times blogger, Pro-fessor William Reville explains, “The lead-ing hypothesis is that dark energy is a prop-erty of empty space itself and this hypo-

thesis fits the astrophysical evidence betterthan the other two.” It was Albert Einsteinwho first posited that empty space – thespace between stars and galaxies – is notactually empty, explains NASA’s Sciencewebsite, noting that “Space has amazingproperties, many of which are just begin-ning to be understood. The first propertythat Einstein discovered is that it is pos-sible for more space to come into existence.”As Reville puts it, “The vacuum is actually aseething sea of virtual particle-antiparticlepairs that suddenly pop into existence andinstantly disappear again by annihilatingeach other.” Referring to Einstein’s theoryof gravity, specifically the version that con-tains a cosmological constant, NASA says,“‘empty space’ can possess its own energy.Because this energy is a property of spaceitself, it would not be diluted as space ex-pands. As more space comes into existence,more of this energy-of-space would appear.This would cause the Universe to expandfaster and faster.”

A second hypothesis is that dark en-ergy represents a dynamic energy fluid orfield that permeates all of space but coun-

Unravelling the mystery of Dark Energyby Elisa Graf

Albert Einstein

From the Esoteric Teachings“The underlying purpose of all life is the creation of unity, thus expressing the inter-connectedness of all atoms. For most men, cosmos is a collection of separate materialbodies, infinitely large and distant, inertly obeying mechanical laws of matter. In real-ity, cosmos, Space Itself, is a living entity, the Source of our Being, our Mother andFather.” (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Unity’, Share International, July 2001)

“The old, mechanistic views of nature and of the forces at work within her are fastdisappearing and a new awareness is dawning of the unity underlying all manifesta-tion. More and more, the concept that all is energy, that energy and matter are differentstates of one reality and can be affected by thought, is being accepted on a wide scaleand is changing men’s view of life.” (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Growth of Con-sciousness’, Share International, September 1992)

“Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is spirit – on the lowest point of its cyclicactivity; and both – are MAYA.” (H.B.Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 1:633)

“When the Biblical words are used: ‘In Him we live and move and have our being,’ wehave the statement of a fundamental law in nature and the enunciated basis of the factwhich we cover by the rather meaningless word: Omnipresence. Omnipresence has itsbasis in the substance of the universe, and in what the scientists call the ether; thisword ‘ether’ is a generic term covering the ocean of energies which are all interrelatedand which constitute that one synthetic energy body of our planet.” (Alice A.Bailey,Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle: Teaching on Telepathy, Part 1.)

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teracts the attractive pull of gravity. Sometheorists have dubbed this energy field“quintessence”, after the fifth element of theGreek philosophers. The last hypothesis,Reville says “is that there is no such thingas dark energy and that the accelerating ex-pansion of the universe is caused by cur-rently unknown properties of gravity thatonly manifest themselves over vast scalessuch as over the entire observable uni-verse.”

Those familiar with the Ageless WisdomTeaching might suggest that science ap-pears to be nearing a long-awaited revela-tion – one that recognizes that dark energyis really, in fact, what occultists call theetheric planes of matter. In his book, TheReappearance of the Christ and the Mas-ters of Wisdom, Benjamin Creme refers tothe etheric planes as an “ocean of energy”,describing them as four planes of still finermatter, “above the dense physical-solid, li-quid, and gaseous which constitute theetheric envelope of this planet, and of whichthe dense physical planes are a precipita-tion”. He further comments in Share Inter-national magazine that, “All matter is a pre-cipitation of light and so the field of matteris light precipitated into seven more or lessmaterial planes.” Alice A. Bailey’s A Treat-ise on Cosmic Fire confirms that while theetheric planes are “gradations of physicalplane matter of a rarer and more refined kind,[they] are physical nevertheless”.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), the well-known psychoanalyst and scientist, alsodiscovered this primordial energy – whichhe called ‘orgone’ – and considered it to bean energy interpenetrating all forms of mat-ter. Reich experimented with orgone in manyways, developing simple technologies andtools for healing and even cloud-bustingand rain-making. So revolutionary were hisstudies that the US Food and Drug Admin-istration (USFDA) had him arrested oncharges of fraud and sent to prison where,

sadly, he died. It was also ordered that hisbooks be burned.

Scientific discovery of the etheric planesclearly has enormous implications for hu-manity, potentially revolutionizing all as-pects of life on our planet. Scientific inves-tigations of these subtle levels of matterwould explain how homeopathy and otheralternative healing methods such as acu-puncture actually work, and what happensto human beings after the death of the physi-cal body. Perhaps, most importantly, itwould open the door to public recognitionof the value of meditation, the multi-dimensional constitution of man, and theancient truth of the evolutionary journey ofconsciousness.

Until then, scientists continue their at-tempts to decode the elusive nature of darkenergy, noting that better data, and more ofit, is needed. The most recent efforts haveculminated in the largest map of the uni-verse to date, taken using a 2.5metre-dia-meter telescope at Apache Point Observat-ory, New Mexico, and released in July 2016by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This re-markable photograph took five years to pro-duce and reveals dark energy’s effects, asits interplay with gravity results in the dis-tribution of galaxies across the Universe.The map charts the positions and distancesof 1.2 million galaxies across a volume ofnearly 650 billion cubic light years. A singledot represents a galaxy – home to a few hun-

dred billion stars. Researchers are using themap to search for spherical ripples or baryonacoustic oscillations (BAO) created bysound waves in the early Universe, whichexpand through the interplay of gravity anddark energy. The combined work of hun-dreds of astronomers working independ-ently around the world has shown that darkenergy appears to be a “cosmological con-stant,” which Clarks says, “suggests it is aconstant energy field stretching through-out space”.

At the same time, scientists in Hungaryrecently reported that research using a par-ticle accelerator has yielded the possiblediscovery of a new type of subatomic par-ticle, 30 times heavier than an electron.Though it’s not clear whether this particlewas a matter particle or a force-carrying par-ticle, the researchers think it may suggestthe existence of a fifth force of nature.Jonathan Feng, a professor of physics andastronomy at the University of California,Irvine, said in a press release that, “If it’strue, it’s revolutionary. For decades we’veknown of four fundamental forces: gravita-tion, electromagnetism, and the strong andweak nuclear forces. If confirmed by furtherexperiments, this discovery of a possible fifthforce would completely change our under-standing of the Universe, with con-sequences for the unification of forces anddark matter.”

The next attempt to study dark energylaunches in 2020, as the European SpaceAgency inaugurates its six-year-long Euclidmission, with more than 1000 scientists rep-resenting 14 European countries participat-ing. Euclid will attempt to map the shapes,positions and movements of two billion gal-axies across more than a third of the sky. Asthe website for Hetdex, the Hobby-EberlyTelescope Dark Energy Experiment, elo-quently expresses, such ongoing effortswill, “help us understand the vast cosmic‘ocean’ of dark energy – an ocean that weare just beginning to explore”.

WilhelmReich

References:science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2016/jul/26/largest-ever-map-of-the-universe-points-to-mysterious-dark-energywww.upi.com/Science_News/2016/08/15/New-study-confirms-possibility-of-fifth-force-of-nature/1771471292636/www.irishtimes.com/news/science/dark-energy-the-repulsive-force-that-is-pulling-the-universe-apart-1.2736328 www.lucistrust.org/online_books/telepathy_and_the_etheric_vehicle_obooks/section_one_teaching_on_telepathy_part1#etheric+planesCreme, Benjamin, The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom. London, ShareInternational Foundation, rev. June 2007. •