Rulers of the Universe – Part Three
Almost every person alive today believes that the universe that they see and sense around them exists outside of themselves as a real physical phenomenon. They believe with utter conviction that the universe began many billions of years before they were born, and will continue to manifest many billions of years after they are dead. This sense of outward reality seems so patently obvious to them that they never stop to question whether this belief is actually correct.
Yet when physicists in the 20th century attempted to explain exactly what matter really was, they were led away from the outward world of physical “things” towards subjective states of consciousness. In short, the outer world that we all take to be “real” was found to be “unreal”, or at least dependent upon the state of mind of the observer. And this observer was found to be an integral part of whatever it was that was observed.
According to the latest findings of quantum mechanics, scientists have concluded that there is no such thing as a created universe that exists independently of ourselves. As we have seen in the previous instalment, physicists like Henry Stapp have unequivocally stated: “The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world, but rather that there definitely is not a substantive physical world.”
As physicist John Wheeler has confirmed: “Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there'”. Or, as the British physicist Sir James Jeans explained: “Objective realities exist, because certain things affect your consciousness and mine in the same way, but we are assuming something we have no right to assume if we label them as either ‘real’ or ‘ideal'”.
But this is exactly what the ancient Rishis and other enlightened Masters have been saying for thousands of years. In the words of the 20th century sage Sri Ramana Maharshi: “Those who have realized the Self by direct and immediate experience clearly perceive beyond all doubt that the phenomenal world as an objective, independent reality is wholly nonexistent.” We find its echo in the teachings of the Buddha: “The Buddha said to Subhuti, ‘All that has form is an illusive existence. When it is perceived that all form is no form, the Tathagata is recognized'”.
In his epic work The Crest Jewel of Wisdom the 8th century sage Sankara wrote: “With the emergence of the mind everything arises and with its subsidence everything ceases. In the dream state, in which there are no objects, the mind creates its dream world of enjoyers and others by its powers. Similarly, all that it perceives in the waking state is its own display.”
As the 20th century Rishi Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj has explained: “The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto your self a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it.” He goes on to add: “You create the world in your imagination like a dream. As you cannot separate the dream from yourself, so you cannot have an outer world independent of yourself.”
Again, he is merely repeating the ancient wisdom taught by the Rishis of old. As recorded in the Ashtavakra Gita written more than three thousand years ago: “The universe is merely a mode of mind; in reality it has no existence”. And as we find in the ancient Hindu classic Advaita Bodha Deepika: “Both the dream world and the waking world are only mental and illusory. There can be no doubt of this. Only the waking world is a long drawn out illusion and the dream is a short one. This is the only difference and nothing more.”
The findings of quantum physicists have thus come to echo the ancient teachings of the Rishis. As Fritjof Capra wrote in The Tao of Physics: “Modern physics has confirmed most dramatically one of the basic ideas of Eastern mysticism; that all the concepts we use to describe nature are limited, that they are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but creations of the mind.”
When Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj remarks: “The consciousness and the world appear and disappear together, hence they are two aspects of the same state”, we can compare this with the words of the American physicist Henry Margenau: “Consciousness is the primary medium of all reality. Even the external world is initially a posit, a projection of consciousness.”
The ultimate essence of this quest into the true nature of the universe rests upon the phenomenon of consciousness. What exactly is consciousness? What is its nature? What is its source? Does it emerge from the brain as many modern researchers claim? Or does it have its origin in some more ethereal realm? The answers to these questions will form the subject of the following instalments.
