Spiritual and Physical Complements

By Richard Lewis, PhD

Fifty years ago, I was sitting on a sidewalk in San Francisco in the pouring rain, having an existential crisis. Seven months earlier, I had left my position as a senior scientist in London, intending to take a five-week paid vacation in America. Instead, I found myself fundraising on Castro Street—selling flowers that no one wanted to buy, while some passersby mocked me. I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake.

Suddenly, I was surrounded by a golden light in human form. I felt deeply loved and completely known. In astonishment, I asked, “Who are you?”

As the light faded, the reply came: “I am you.”

That answer has puzzled me ever since. Energized and uplifted, I sold all my f lowers and returned home feeling triumphant.

This was one of only a few spiritual experiences I have had, but it left a lasting impact. Along with the Divine Principle’s explanation of the spirit world and the living testimonies of church members, it convinced me that the spirit world is a real dimension of life—one that my scientific training had never addressed. Science education in the 1960s was still largely Victorian in outlook, offering little hint of the deeper revolutions already underway.

The Divine Principle teaches that creation is built on complementary pairs that interact according to law. When these complements unite, they produce new qualities that neither possesses alone. This is expressed in the Unificationist concept of Origin Division–Union (ODU): the One divides into complementary parts, which then reunite at a higher level.

Convinced by Father Moon that science and religion are destined to merge into a unified understanding of reality, I began a personal search to understand the spirit world from a scientific perspective. What follows is a brief account of how far that search has taken me.

Scientific “Loose Ends”

Modern science is far more advanced than its Victorian predecessor. It has explored reality with extraordinary precision and enabled the technologies that shape our modern world. Yet beneath its success lies a set of unresolved mysteries—known unknowns—that suggest the existence of a realm complementary to the physical world.

In summary, these scientific mysteries point to something that:

• Makes up about 70 percent of the universe

• Has anti-gravitational properties 

• May involve negative energy

• Allows for supersymmetric structures

• Fits naturally into a complementary spacetime geometry

Two of these are experimentally observed; the rest arise from theory.

Dark Energy

We are constantly in motion—rotating with the Earth, orbiting the Sun, circling the galaxy, and moving toward large-scale cosmic structures—yet we do not feel it. Scientists detect this motion by measuring it against a stable background: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the ancient light released shortly after the Big Bang.

Using well-understood astronomical “standard candles,” scientists expected to find that the expansion of the universe was slowing down due to gravity. Instead, they discovered the opposite: the expansion is accelerating.

This unexpected force was named dark energy. It acts against gravity and is far more abundant than both ordinary matter and dark matter combined. Roughly 70 percent of the cosmos appears to be made of this expansive, anti-gravitational component, while the remaining 30 percent consists of the familiar gravitational physical universe.

Beyond the Speed of Light

Physics teaches that nothing can travel faster than light. However, when Einstein’s equations are written in natural units, they reveal two complementary possibilities:

• Ordinary matter has positive energy and cannot exceed the speed of light.

• Hypothetical particles, called tachyons, would have negative energy and could exist only beyond the speed of light.

While tachyons have never been observed, they are mathematically allowed. Importantly, particles with negative energy would naturally produce anti-gravitational effects, making them consistent with dark energy.

Supersymmetry

At the most fundamental level, physics divides reality into matter and forces. Supersymmetry proposes a deeper balance: every particle of matter has a corresponding force partner, and every force has a matter partner.

Although these supersymmetric particles have not yet been detected in our physical realm, the mathematics strongly supports their existence. Once again, theory points to a complementary realm that mirrors our own but operates under different conditions.

 The Geometry of Spacetime

Einstein’s spacetime cannot be fully described using ordinary numbers alone. Instead, it requires a mix of real and imaginary numbers. In our physical universe, time behaves like a real dimension, while space behaves like three imaginary ones at 90° to the real axis.

Mathematically, this structure implies a missing counterpart: a complementary spacetime with one imaginary time dimension and three real spatial dimensions. Such a geometry would naturally support a realm very different from the physical world, yet fully consistent with known mathematics.

Conclusion

Modern science—both experimentally and theoretically—allows for the existence of a complementary realm to the physical universe. Such a realm would be dominated by anti-gravity, negative energy, and supersymmetric structures, existing within a complementary spacetime geometry.

Seen in this light, the spiritual and physical worlds are not in conflict, but form two complementary halves of a single, unified cosmos.

So don't let anybody fool you by telling you there's no room in modern physics for a spiritual realm; for there is plenty!