MAYA- The world of Quantum Physics - Part 2

Our lives can become perfect only if we participate in this great interchange with nature and the universe. As the Gita tells us in chapter 3, “Sahayajna praja sristwa purovacha prajapati.” - The creator created all things and instilled the idea of yajna or selfless action in them. The sun shines, the rains fall, the tree gives fruit and so on with no thought of gain. They do it as an offering to the divine that created them. In this orgy of selfless giving the human being lives, utterly selfish, with an eye to his personal comfort alone. Hence it is that the human being has such a capacity for unhappiness. This is because Nature did not mean him to live in such a way, totally unconnected with everything else. No man is an island and no one can live without any sort of dependence. There is no “me” and “mine” as we think but all things are connected in an amazing way to the energy field which in Hinduism is known as chitta. In Hinduism, “mamta and ahamta” (me and mine) have always been considered to be the two knots which alienate us from God. Any alienation from our divine foundation will bring sorrow in its wake. In this unified field there is no place for me and mine.

If you hurt others, you are actually hurting yourself even though you may not know it. “Do to others what you would have them do to you,” is a basic dictum of all religions. “As you sow so you shall reap.”

Anyone who performs actions only for himself without any care or consideration for others and for the world around him, will have to suffer. This is the law of nature. Any selfish act immediately isolates us from the world and from nature and many such acts eventually bring unhappiness, discontent, ill health and continuous bad luck which we blame on others and on our fate etc, never realizing that it is only a consequence of our own selfish actions.

So actually, speaking the quantum world deals with shadow symbols, it is a dream world but this is not the ultimate reality as the scientists themselves are willing to admit. This is exactly what the rishis meant when they called this world – “maya”. It is a shadow world and we see only the shadows of things but not their reality. The shadows appear to be the whole world and this is because of a strange phenomenon in which our minds get bound up in the cocoon of time, space and causality and we start to imagine the shadows to be real. This is the world which the Gita describes in the 7th chapter. “Bhumi, aponalo vayu, kham mano, buddhi eva cha. Ahamkaram itiyam me bhinna Prakriti ashtada.” “My lower Prakriti is eight-fold and is composed of the five elements, earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect and ego. But this is my lower nature which is available to the senses and which we believe to be real.” Krishna then goes on to say “Apareyamitastwanyam Prakriti viddhi me param.” “But know this to be my lower nature. My higher nature is that spiritual being which sustains this entire universe and which is totally different from this.” Krishna continues in the 7thchapter, “These two natures form the womb of all beings. I am the origin and dissolution of the entire universe.”

Modern physics can only tell us about this lower nature. It has gone up to the chitta which is the boundary between the lower and higher but till now it is unable to tell us anything of the nature of ultimate reality. Eddington declared that the great difference between old and new physics is that, though both are dealing with shadow symbols, the new physics has been forced to accept the fact that it is indeed dealing with shadows - a set of abstract equations and not with reality itself. All the pictures that science draws of nature which can be proved, are mathematical pictures. However, it is unable to formulate the ultimate reality. Even though these physicists were able to reduce matter to its ultimate and fundamental level and put it into mathematical equations, yet to date they have not been able to reduce God into a mathematical equation. This is where Hinduism has the advantage over quantum physics.

The rishis of old as has been mentioned before also knew that this is a shadow world. But they asked the million-dollar question “If this is a shadow world then what is the Being that casts the shadow? A shadow obviously cannot exist on its own. What is it that holds all these things together? All our scriptures have given the answer. This shadow world is a “becoming” but there is a “Being” which is the cause of these shadows. This exists because THAT exists. If THAT were not to be, then “This” will cease to be. Krishna declares, “All things exist in Me but mark my mystery, I do not exist in them.” What he means to say is that God in not a sum total of all creation. Even though they are in Him, he is not in them and that is why no amount of enquiry into the shadow world can give us the truth of absolute consciousness. The fish exist in the water but the water does not exist in the fish or because of the fish. Fish cannot exist without water but water can and does exist without fish!

In another simile Krishna says, “Everything is strung on me as pearls on a string.” The necklace has a shape and value only due to the string which holds them together. If the string is broken the necklace will no longer exist. The pearls will roll around in a random fashion like negative particles.

The position of the western scientist is that of the jijnasu or enquirer on the path of truth as the Gita puts it. They are eager and anxious to know the Truth but somehow this ultimate truth seems to defy all attempts at generalizations. Hence, we see that even though we live in this highly scientific age, yet there is a great belief on the part of even educated people to believe in the occult and the miraculous. There seem to be some things in the world which defy scientific investigation. This is where Hindu spiritualism steps in to show us that some things exist which are beyond the level of the mind. They can be known only by going above the plane of the mind.

However, to give them their due, the quantum physicist did discover something novel which the ancient physicist could not accept – that the only thing which can be called real in this shadow world is the consciousness of the spectator or the experimenter. Without that consciousness even this shadow world would not exist. Everything is centered round the consciousness of the experimenter. This was a great break through. Till now the experimenter’s job was always to get out of the way of the experiment and not interfere with the purely mechanical process involved in the experiment. Now it was proved by the scientist that the individual consciousness has everything to do with the final outcome of the experiment. This consciousness stems from a phenomenon known as super-radiance which is a state of perfect coherence.

Normally quantum particles act in a haphazard fashion of chaos or disorder but when the individual consciousness is brought to bear on them, they lose their individuality and begin to act as a single unit. This coherence extends into the world. This coherence of consciousness represents the greatest form of order known to nature and can help to shape and create order in the world. In meditation and especially in the state of Samadhi (super conscious state), our brain reaches that zero- point field of the chitta which has perfect coherence. This was the method taught by the rishis to go beyond the mind and attain that state of pure knowledge in which everything else can be known. This is how they gained the vast amount of knowledge which is given in the Vedas.

This is the substructure which underlies the whole universe. It is a recording medium of everything, by which everything can communicate with everything else and by which perfect knowledge can be gained, which is undiluted by causality.

Living consciousness is not an isolated entity. It is not the personal property of one individual. This much has been discovered in the quantum field. We think that each of us has a separate atman even though our scriptures tell us that when this apparently separate atman is covered with the body, it is called the jivatma but this jivatma is the same as the Paramatma – meaning to say it is not an isolated entity. This lives on even after the body dies since it has never been isolated from the whole so there is no question of going back. It simply slips into what it ever was. Like the water in the bottle returning to the water of the pool when the bottle is broken. This consciousness of people has incredible powers. It can increase order in the world and make it as we wish it to be. If a number of individuals concentrate and wish for the same thing it has even greater force. That is why we say that communal prayer has more power. The all-absorbing topic of the day is how to control the climatic changes which are being increasingly felt all over the world. If enough people had a burning desire to change the situation, they would do far better if they got together and meditated on this topic, willing the minds of people to change and thus stop the terrible effects we have brought upon ourselves. This would be far more effective than holding conferences and reading papers.

Another great thing the quantum scientist did for Hinduism is that they found out that individual consciousness does not die with the death of the body which is what Hinduism has been saying all the time. Krishna says, in the Bhagavad Gita, “Like a man changing his old clothes, the spirit changes one body for another. But the spirit lives on so why grieve when someone dies. It is only his body, which was unreal in any case, which has passed on to the elements from which it came into existence. His reality is the atman which was never born and thus can never die.”

Scientific experiments have even proved that there may be something called a life current or energy flowing through the universe which Hinduism calls the Brahman. Science seems to have provided some sort of evidence for what mankind has had faith in, but no solid evidence, from the dawn of time. Thus, science has put an end to dualism in the final sense. They have proved in the laboratory that the dualistic world which we think we see, is a myth, a shadow cast on the wall. The only reality is that higher collective consciousness which exists for all time in all places. This is what our Hindu scriptures have been saying from time immemorial. It is high time that Hindus start educating themselves and their children on the greatness of our culture. Hindus should shake off this sense of inferiority which has been enforced on them by their western conquerors and start to take pride in their own culture and religion since indeed it is the only religion which is based on scientific facts. There are many organizations and even nations who hope that Indians will continue to feel inferior and this is the tool they use to break our country for they fear that a time will come when we will be the greatest country in the world. This is not just a probability but a very great possibility if only the Hindus unite. Many secret ideological weapons are being used to split the Hindus and thus break this holy land. Let all right- thinking people all over the world realize the glory of the Sanatana dharma which has always prayed only for the well being of the whole world – “loka samastath sukhino Bhavantu.” “May the whole world be happy.”

Hari Aum Tat Sat