Code name God-The Spiritual Odyssey of a Man of Science-(Important points)

Mani Bhaumik, Ph.D.

Penguin Books, New Delhi. 2005

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One day when I was feeling particularly strung out, I found that – thanks to my heritage- I had in my ancestral kit bag a tool that Westerners were then only beginning to discover: meditation.

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There is a tenet of modern scientific philosophy, which argues that great advances in knowledge do not occur solely through trial and error, but await occurrence of intuition and readiness of the human mind.

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Unless you have experienced it, you cannot imagine how unhappy a wealthy man can be.

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Norman Cousins was undoubtedly a founding father of what has become known as the holistic health movement, a movement that has now entered the mainstream of medicine. I met Norman Cousins about 1986.

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Norman Cousins had been diagnosed with a degenerative cell disease and he wrote a book,’ Anatomy of an illness as Perceived by the Patient’. This book ushered in the new field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) and earned Norman honorary MD degrees and a clinic in his name at UCLA Medical Center.

When Norman was told that his condition was terminal, he promptly checked himself out of the hospital and onto a small hotel room, where for weeks he treated himself with a course of funny movies and deep belly laughs. Miraculously, (and the word seems justified), his incurable disease went into complete remission, and a new field of medical science was born.

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Norman Cousins, colleague of world statesmen, writers, and intellectuals, showed repeatedly that the body’s immune cell count can be bolstered by conscious efforts and spontaneous remission can occur by visualizations focused on the afflicted area. PNI is validating this experimentally. He was walking proof of the influence of mind over matter.

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Common ground of all these great faiths is to be found in their essence: mystical insight. Insight, by its nature, is experiential. It cannot be effectively taught, or preached, or read about, except by way of analogy, allegory, or most clumsily, dogma. But the testimony of the mystics seems eminently convincing.

You can WATCH Mani Bhaumik's VIDEO INTERVIEW

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When you get down to the level of religious epiphany, the experience is the same: dissolution of the ego boundaries, a merging of the observer and the observed, a union with the one source of all. I

In the following chapters, we will uncover- through a quick dip into quantum physics- that when we penetrate to the deepest level of reality, we seem to find an undivided totality, an ‘emptiness’ that is- paradoxically- full. The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that the precepts of mysticism differ from those of modern physics mostly in language and methodology. Could it be that the common experience of the mystics has an analog in the ‘unbroken wholeness’ of the quantum physics?

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A good way to understand the material world is to think of it as consisting of three layers. As they all interpenetrate, the division into three layers is somewhat arbitrary.

The first layer of reality is the observable universe of material objects and natural phenomena that surrounds us and with which we interact through our five primary senses. This is the reality that has a thereness (that is, it seems to exist outside of us), which led Descartes and his followers to presume that there was an irreconcilable split between mind and matter- between the perceiver and the perceived. That is the only reality for most people.

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The second layer of reality requires a leap in imagination. It is characterized by a ceaseless interplay of energy at a microscopic scale, at an unimaginably fast rate, a level that our senses are not equipped to perceive. If evolution did not condition us this way, we would all suffer intolerable vertigo.

An atom consists of a positively charged nucleus in which protons and neutrons are bound together, balanced by the negatively charged electrons surrounding it. The protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of even tinier particles ‘quarks’. All the matter that makes up our everyday world is composed of two kinds of fundamental particles- quarks and electrons.

Thanks to Einstein, we now know that quarks and other elementary particles are nothing but discrete packets of energy. Although the objects in our midst appear as solid and substantial as the Rock of Gibraltar, their constituent parts are in a constant state of flux. The engine of this flux is energy, and its top speed is the speed of light.

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No one, including physicists, knows exactly what energy is, but it reveals itself to us through the forms it takes. There is only energy doing work of different kinds.

But how is energy stabilized into quarks and electrons, let alone the complicated structures we recognize as rocks, trees, birds, you and me? If all things are made of this abstract and chimerical substance known as energy, why do we see them as stable and unchanging? Why don’t the fundamental particles simply fall apart? Because their energy is confined, like a genie in a bottle- but these bottles are not physical. They are what are known as fields, and I’ll warn you in advance, these are really abstract. Now we are on the brink of the third layer of reality. The fields are known to us by way of the forces associated with them.

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It was thought that electromagnetic waves could only be propagated through some material medium. For more than two millennia, that medium was thought to be something called the aether. It took the prodigious intellect of Albert Einstein to recognize that the medium was empty space itself. Furthermore, Einstein showed us that space, time and field cannot exist separately; they are always magnificently intertwined in their existence.

The example of inducing electrical current into a coil is a good illustration of a field effect. So is the way that the Earth’s magnetic field aligns the needle of a compass on a north-south axis, no matter where we are on the globe. These phenomena meet the basic definition of all fields, which is that they permeate a region of space and can be delineated at each point. This is difficult, if not impossible, thing to visualize, but it becomes easier the more we are mad aware of a particular field’s influence.

So far we have been talking about classical manifest fields, those whose influence is felt locally, like our own planet’s field of gravity or the way static electricity makes our hair stand up on a dry winter day. We could easily be misled into thinking that an electric field is something that arises from matter, like the heat rising from a car’s engine or the way iron filings line up around the poles of a magnet.

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But this is not the case; the truth is far stranger. Even if we yank the Earth from the sky, an unmanifest field having the blueprint for gravity will still remain in empty space!

These unmanifest fields pervade all space and time, and they are known as quantum fields. The unmanifest field’s influence is nonlocal, in the sense that it is felt equally in all parts of the universe. Comprehending this intrinsic fundamental reality of our cosmos is a key to grasping our later discussions on how science supports the concept of the one source.

How did we come to realize the existence of unmanifest quantum fields? We learn as children that every snowflake that drops from the sky is different, but one of the most mysterious of quantum physics is that the elementary particles, such as electrons, are absolutely identical everywhere in the universe, no matter when or where they are created. The amount of their mass, electric charge, and spin are always exactly the same.

This mystery of the matching particles was solved in the last half of the 20^th century when physicists determined that underlying quantum fields give birth to elementary particles. A new branch of physics known as quantum field theory was the foundation of this revelation.

As MIT’s Frank Wilczek, one of the high priests of quantum field theory and a newly minted Nobel laureate sums it up,’ In quantum field theory, the primary elements of reality are not individual particles, but underlying fields.

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Thus, for example, all electrons are but excitations of an underlying field, naturally called the electron field, which fills all space and time. The same holds true for all the fundamental particles of which matter is made.

Imagine these elementary particles as being like the spray that’s thrown up as ocean waves crash against the rocks, only to fall back into the sea from which it came. My world was shaken up as a young man with the realization that things I had previously thought as solid and inert, in fact, consisted of the quantized ‘lumps of energy’ we call fundamental particles.

Now it sounds like we are talking about the idea of something ‘virtual’ becoming something ‘real’, that is actually what happens. Strange as it may seem, just like a compulsive credit card addict, a quantum field constantly borrows energy from space, creating pairs of virtual particles (matter and anti-matter), most of which have life spans far, far shorter than that of the ocean spray. The energy debt to space must be repaid, and the larger the debt, the shorter the time to pay back. But as soon as there is sufficient energy surplus made available by any source, stable particles are able to emerge from the quantum field and have a ‘real’ existence in the universe. Without energy there are only virtual particles,

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Virtual particles do produce some important effects that can be measured, giving tangible evidence of the existence of the numinous quantum fields.

A quantum is simply a small, discrete unit in which a form of energy may express itself. A quantum of light, for example, is a photon. So, although light, as a type of electromagnetic radiation, is generally conceived of in waves, those waves themselves are made up of quanta, just as a stream of audio and video coming into your internet port if made up of bits of data. And unlike our familiar classical fields, the magnitude of energy of a quantum field is not continuous but discrete, or quantized.

All of the known quantum fields possess the following confounding characteristic: They are not, in any geometrical sense, locatable, yet they are everywhere. A quantum field cannot have a fixed value at any given time, not even the value of zero. As a result, the amplitude (the size) of the field must change all the time, producing what are known as vacuum fluctuations. It is a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ situation. But we observe the effect of these fluctuations in the Casimir Effect and in several other phenomena.

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In 1948, Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir predicted that even in a vacuum, a measurable force will act to push together two parallel metal plates. Casimir was right, but it was 1996 before physicist Steven Lamoreaux conclusively demonstrated the existence of this electromagnetic ghost force. The notion that all fields fluctuate at the quantum level has now been validated, thus providing our strongest evidence of the actuality of the unmanifest quantum fields themselves.

Along with the constant creation and annihilation of virtual particles, the wild fluctuation of the unmanifest fields creates a quantum frenzy at the microscopic dimensions of space. This behavior gets increasingly more energetic at smaller distance and time scales. Thus, empty space is not empty at all. It is a seething cauldron of quantum activity.

The unmanifest quantum fields interlace throughout the cosmos like multidimensional fabrics woven on a celestial loom, and strangest of all, as we shall see, each infinitesimal weave of the fabric contains, so to speak, the whole cloth, just as the poet William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand.”

Feeling dizzy? Good. Occasional disorientation is the occupational hazard of all truth seekers. Moreover, it shakes us from our normal frame of reference. Before we go on, take a moment to contemplate the new world round you- a world in which there is no such thing as empty space, and the most crucial elements of your existence are things you can’t see.

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In addition to quarks and electrons, there are a host of other fundamental matter particles, like neutrinos, but they are either unstable or interact very weakly. So we do not observe them except under special circumstances, such as in a high-energy “particle “ physics lab. These matter particles are all products of the various matter fields. However, the more familiar force fields also have their respective particles (elementary force particles). For example, a photon is the particle associated with the electromagnetic force field and the graviton is presumed to be the particle related to the gravity force field.

A word about terminology. The fact that we can speak almost interchangeably about fields, on the one hand, and the force and matter they give rise to, on the other, is at the core of the quantum field theory: Both elementary force particles and elementary matter particles are merely excitations of their corresponding underlying fields, which makes the quantum fields, in a sense, the breeding ground of material creation.

The triumph of the quantum field theory in explaining all the observed fundamental particles is a hallmark of twentieth- century physics.

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Indeed the unseen but ubiquitous quantum fields and their vacuum fluctuations may seem utterly alien, but so was the idea of radio waves a century ago. The omnipresent quantum fields are yet a further step into a phantom world, but regardless of our puzzlement, they remain stubbornly and definitely there, permeating even the darkest sectors of space where there is no MTV!

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The puzzle that Einstein was not able to solve, but contemporary physicists are coming close to putting together, is this: Why, if everything is ultimately made of one substance- energy- does nature provide so many different types of fields for energy to work its magic? Most physicists are now quite convinced that these diverse fields, including a few that Einstein had not considered, are nothing but different aspects of single field.

One of the first logical question that arises when we talk about the nucleus of an atom is: What keeps those positively charged protons from flying apart? After all, like charges repel. This does not present such a problem when we are looking at the hydrogen atom, which consists of a single positively charged proton and a single negatively charged electron.

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But in order to get helium, the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms must be fused, along with two neutrons, and likewise in increasing numbers with all the other atoms. What is the agent of this fusion? What glue could possibly counteract the mutual repulsion of positively charged protons sitting, as it were, side by side? It is the strong nuclear force that binds the nuclei as well as their constituent quarks, and lucky for us, it’s a force more than a hundred times stronger than that of electromagnetism and almost unimaginably stronger than the gravitational force that keeps the moon orbiting the earth.

The fourth of the great natural forces, in addition to 1) gravity, 2) electromagnetism, and the 3) strong nuclear force, is the 4) weak nuclear force. Befitting its name, it almost always receives the weakest exposure because its rang of influence is limited to one thousandth of the size of even the tiny proton. This force governs the rate and process of radioactive decay within the nucleus. It can be thought of as an essential sidekick to the strong force for making helium from hydrogen in the solar furnace that supplies energy to all life forms on earth. In spite of its unassuming name, the weak nuclear force, or weak force, is still more than a million billion billion billion times stronger than the force of gravity.

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If the force of gravity was not extremely weak compared to the other forces, the many atoms of which humans, planets, or stars consist would simply collapse upon each other. In fact, life could not have emerged as it has with even a tiny variation in these strengths. We will be astonished to see, however, what happens to these inequalities under extreme circumstances.

To help explain the unification of forces, we must speak first of Nature’s symmetries. Nature’s symmetries are about elemental forces and particles giving up their distinguishing ‘marks’ and behaving as if they were characterized by the same natural laws. The forces and fields we know are the result of broken symmetries of nature. So, restoration of symmetries is the magic key to unification, and unification is the key to understanding the common source.

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Contrary to our notion of space as an idle bystander, space is dynamically involved in everything that happens in the universe. We have already seen that ‘empty’ space is not empty at all. In fact, quantum physics suggests that the primary field, possessing the basic blueprint of all thing physical, is encoded in its fabric. Normally physicists think of unification leading up to the primary field to be possible only at the extraordinary temperature of the infant universe. How then, can I maintain that this unification exists everywhere even in the space around (and within) your big toe?

It is because, according to quantum field theory, physics at extremely high temperatures is equivalent to physics at the fundamentally small distances typical of Planck’s dimensions. We can perceive this more graphically by recalling our realization that empty space experiences frenetic quantum activity in the microscopic dimensions.

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Could it be that nature repeats its pattern in the human genome? Our genome (DNA), which is present in our very first cell and consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes, possesses the blueprint of an entire human being. While miraculously putting together about a hundred trillion cells in the right proportion to create the various organs of the human body, the genome remains ever-present in each one of those cells, administering different aspects of our biological existence. Only a small percentage of the genome is active in an adult cell, and this expression oversees the proper functioning of that particular unit. Nevertheless, it possesses instructions for the whole works. This is now vividly demonstrated in cloning, where, for instance, an entire sheep can be replicated from any adult sheep cell.

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Einstein believed that the universe was essentially static. Hubble discovered otherwise. He found indisputable evidence that the galaxies were on the move, most of them slipping rapidly away from each other and from us. The more distant the galaxy, the faster it was receding. Not only was the universe not static, it was undergoing dynamic expansion. If the future was taking galaxies farther and farther apart, then it stood to reason that in the past they must have been closer together. So close, ultimately, that matter’s compression (due to the effects of gravity) might result in what Einstein’s equations predicted to be a singularity, a point where the laws of universe would simply break down.

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The conditions preceding this jaw- dropping even would have been hotter than any hell one can possibly imagine because that’s what happens when matter is compressed. This fact of physics pointed to clues that eventually made the case for a cosmic explosion as the event that kicked off the expansion of the universe.

It is important to note that it was an explosion of space itself and not an explosion in any existing space. In the expanding universe today, it is space between galaxies that is expanding. As we shall see, there was no space before, it appeared along with the bang.

George Gamow theorized in the 1940s that the intense fireball of the Big Bang would leave an ‘afterglow’ throughout the universe. His calculations suggested that the expansion of the universe would cool the radiation of the primeval ball of fire, leaving traces to be found today in the form of microwaves.

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In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two young radio astronomers, were frustrated in their attempt to get a clean signal from the big new horn antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey because of a constant hissing that seemed to come from all corners of the universe at all times. A microwave telescope is simply big ‘ear’ attached to some very sophisticated analytical equipment, and a big enough ear can pick up things that otherwise might not be ‘heard’, just as Hubble’s big telescope allowed him to see things previously unseen.

Though neither realized it initially, Penzias and Wilson had picked up Gamow’s predicted microwave relic of the Big Bang. They were listening to the energy of creation, and this energy is everywhere.

Turn on your TV. If you have a cable, switch the set to a channel other than the receiving channel, and if you have an antenna, switch to a channel with nothing on. Now, take a moment to contemplate the static that you se on your screen. Let your eyes go a little lazy, until the dots begin to dance. You are in part looking at a very ancient fingerprint, because a percentage of that static is the microwave remnant of the birth of the universe.

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As space expanded nearly instantaneously due to inflation, wrinkles were stretched out, thereby leaving scars. These scars are detectable to us today by way of the exceedingly small variations in the temperature of microwave background radiation, and they are believed to be a consequence of the slight excess of matter accumulated I the spacetime wrinkles over a period of time following the expansion depicted by Alan Guth’s inflationary model.

We are not equipped to envision how small a place it may have been, in truth the theorized size of the seed of the cosmic fireball can’t even properly be called a place. It is, at most, one hundred millionth of a billionth the size of a single proton, which itself is about one thousandth billionth the size of a grain of sand.

Guth’s breakthrough was to conjecture that when the GUT (Grand Unified Theory) symmetry broke as a result of cooling due to the universe’s expansion, there was what we might call a pregnant pause ( technically, an instant of false vacuum, a vacuum of higher energy than normal), which caused a spike of negative gravity followed by an inflation of the cosmos by a factor of at least one followed by thirty zeros. Then, in less time than that number expressed as a fraction of a second, it was over, and the nuts and bolts business of universe making began, as inflation released a prodigious anount of energy in what is called a phase transition.

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During inflation, space expanded much, much faster than even the speed of light. The enhanced spacetime wrinkles subsequently became the seeds for the formation of galaxies.

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Combined with other measurements, COBE data also confirmed what the universe is made of today; 4.5% ordinary matter, 25% dark matter of an as yet unknown composition, and about 70% of a mysterious factor known as dark energy, whose origin is elusive.

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Dark energy has an effect of negative gravity similar to that which drove the cosmic inflation. Finding the source and nature of the dark energy is in many ways today’s Holy Grail of cosmology, but could it simply be a rose by another name?

Inflationary theory also tells us something remarkable about energy. The process of inflation created all the positive energy in the universe, but at the same time it created an equal amount of negative energy, in the form of the mutual gravitational attraction of th estuff of the universe (every particle is drawn to every other particle in then cosmos). Mathematical analysis shows that the sum total of positive energy in the universe equals the sum total of negative energy. Therefore, strange as it may sound, the total energyof the universe is zero.

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The human mind’s ability to understand the laws of nature has presented many eminent scientists with a mystery. Einstein expressed it cogently when he said, ‘The most incomprehensible fact about nature is that it is comprehensible.” Distinguished British mathematician Roger Penrose is also bemused by the fact that the universe has developed in obedience to laws that our consciousness seems designed to grasp. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner also referred to the douvle miracle of the existence of the laws of nature and the human mind'’ capacity to divine them. The anthropic principle provides a means for reconciling these two miracles.

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The more we think about it, the harder it becomes to deny that consciousness, the very window through which we eventually gather our prized scientific knowledge, is an integral part of the universal reality. Nobel physicist Eugene Wigner states it eloquently: “ The principal argument is that thought process and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied.” “Cognito, ergo sum”- I think- therfore I am”

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In quantum physical experiments, an observer’s consciousness is capable of bringing about a particular outcome from the coexisting possibilities inherent in any quantum system. Thus, quantum physicists have achieved a victory of sorts in their debate with Einstein be demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that the observer and the observed are fundamentally connected; their relationship is interactive and participatory.

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Focusing an intense laser beam on a special crystal, scientists created a pair of twin photons that shared their common properties, and then sent them off in opposite directions. Such photons are called quantum physically entangled since neither twin has a unique property of its own. Their properties simultaneously coexist in each of them! However, when we measure a particular property of one twin, the other twin instantaneously responds and displays the complementary properly, and this remains true even if an arbitrarily large distance separates the twins. On the face of it, this defies the cosmic speed limit: the velocity of light. A variety of experiments have been performed along this line, always producing the same result.

These experiments not only demonstrate the participatory relationship between the observer and the observed, they have been utilized to achieve a form of quantum teleportation once thought to belong to the realm of science fiction. By superimposing some property of a third photon on one of the twins, the superimposed marker is also instantly teleported to the other twin, wherever it is. This has been done for entangled electrons as well, opening up the possibility that in some future epoch we could reconstruct a physical mass, particle by particle (assuming enough information can be teleported). May be one day we will truly be able to say, ”Beam me up, Scotty.”

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Ordinarily we think of space as that which separates objects. But the nonlocality experiments have demonstrated that if we send twin photons off to different sectors of space, any action performed upon one instantaneously affects the other, as if they remained forever bound in spite of their spatial separation. The implications of this nonlocality are truly jaw-dropping, for it implies that the most distant corner of the cosmos could be, in a quantum- entangled sense, as close as the tip of your nose. It’s no wonder that Einstein referred to such phenomena as ‘ spooky actions at a distance’!

In the quantum world, particle display bizarre behaviors that physicists, in desperation, call quantum weirdness. For example, a quantum particle can occupy more than one place or take more than one path at the same time. This simultaneous coexistence of all possibilities is known as coherent superposition or quantum coherence. If all this sounds creepy to you, you are in good company. Nobel physicist Niels Bohr quipped,” If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about it.” And fellow laureate Richard Feynman adds, “I hope you can accept Nature as she is- absurd.”

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In pre-space, the potentialities of consciousness and the primary field are united through mutual participation on a universal scale. Put another way, the essence of the implicate order is the one source that enfolds both the primary field (the common source of at least everything physical) and consciousness. Based upon this thesis, it would be logical to infer that the one source of the world’s great spiritual traditions is grounded in scientific reality.

Walter Moore, biographer of quantum visionary Erwin Schrodinger, claims that Schrodinger was intuitively influenced by the ancient Indian school of spiritualism known as Vedanta when he formulated quantum mechanics. Perhaps the concept of oneness in Vedanta also led to Schrodinger’s decade-long search for the unified field theory. From Upanishads, Schrodinger finds it to be “really so simple and so clear: Tat twan asi, this is you.”

Schrodinger believed in the Vedic concept that all conscious beings are aspects of the same universal entity. Expressed in terms of our scientific worldview today, consciousness would be manifest when the individual brain’s quantum state is in resonance with the cosmic potentiality of consciousness. After Schrodinger, we may humbly assert that we are all equipped to be tuners of the universal source of consciousness.

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Descartes called matter res extensa ( extended substance), which was defined by its physical location in space.

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Mind, in contrast, was res cogitans (thinking substance) and it had no fixed location at all. Matter answered to the immutable laws of nature while mind answered only to reason, which answered to an unknowable God. If we think about it for a moment, we see that this is still the way we look at things: internal and external, subjective and objective, observer and observed, mind and matter. Our very nature is split.

The only advancement, if it can be called such, on Descartes’ theories has been to declare that mental things occur mostly in the brain, which is not much beyond Descartes’conjecture that matter interfaced with mind in the pineal gland! Post- Enlightenment science proceeded to take God out of the equation altogether, leaving the mind either imprisoned within the walls of the skull or adrift in a void of abstraction, For more than 300 years, consciousness has been a refugee in the universe.

Cartesian dualism was the artifact of an ancient strain that recognized a distinction between what we can think and what we can sense.

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Indeed, great thinkers have long sensed that consciousness in some way transcended the physical, but none of them gave such primacy to matter nor declared such a radical split between “I” and “that” as did the rationalistic children of Cartesian thought.

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A profound shift began to occur shortly after the pivotal year of 1600, for as we have seen, when Cartesianism removed mind from the matter, it also removed most traces of the genuinely sacred from the everyday world.

Since then we have tended to dismiss the ancient ways as superstition, swept away by the great mechanistic discoveries of Enlightenment science. But science alone can not be saddled with the shift to materialism. Science is observation, analysis, and prediction, and these are strongly influenced by the currents of human thought. What currents caused the break between spirituality and science, the deep cut that I called, in the beginning of this book, the wound that must be healed?

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When Descartes reflected upon matter, he experienced “something else” doing the reflecting, something not of the same nature as sea, soil, and skin. This is how our language works. When asked how we can be sure that the dog is outside, we don’t reply, ”Because it barks”, instead answering, ”Because I hear it barking”. We answer by way of our mind and ego. We know that our limbs are attached to us because our mind affirms it ( and in case of phantom limbs, our mind continues to do so even when the physical appendage is missing).

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To paraphrase neurologist Karl Pribram, the “objective ‘I’” has become detached from the “subjective ‘Me’”, the this is separate from that. Once it is postulated that the observing “I” is not an active participant in what it observes, one of the two things happens. Either the universe becomes a vast, deterministic machine, with consciousness, to quote physicist Henry Stapp, lying “impotently, and hence without responsibility, outside the chain of casual events” or we must conclude, with Bishop Berkeley, that the physical world is nothing but a projection of the mind.

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Consciousness is clearly integrated with things like memory, attention, and perhaps most closely, with language, all of which are presumed to have their locus in the brain itself. But consciousness is simply in our heads. It is everywhere we are, and it’s everywhere we are not. As we move in space-time, we move through the potentiality of consciousness.

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Sheldrake has advanced the notion of an “extended mind” that can “reach out” to influence things well beyond the brain’s boundaries. Like Nobel physicist Brian Josephson, he is deeply interested in finding a scientific explanation of psi phenomena such as telepathy. A convincing proof of such phenomena will obviously demonstrate that consciousness is not merely confined within the skull; it is capable of biological nonlocality.

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What significance does the new consciousness paradigm have for you and me in our daily lives? In a nutshell, if the potentiality for consciousness is found to exist at the very foundation or reality- if it is, in a word, basic- then it stands to reason that to be fully conscious is to partake of that potentiality as fully as our human design allows. Ordinary survival and comfort functions- such as heartbeat, hunger, sex drive, and defense- will continue whether we partake of greater consciousness or not. However, it seems unlikely that humankind will achieve its highest potential or reintegrate a genuine spirituality unless we able to tune ourselves to the transpersonal source.

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Science now shows us that our consciousness plays an active role in determining our actions and bringing out specific manifestations of nature. We have also learned that we are part of something much larger, which we have referred to as one source. Perhaps our sense of morality stems from the realization that we are indeed part of something much larger than ourselves. Therefore, our actions should be appropriate to what is implicit in that knowledge. When we act from this realization, we bridge the Cartesian divide of mind from matter and the wound it caused it healed.

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Further we know that empty space is not empty at all. As we have seen, quantum field theory postulates that even the darkest sectors of the universe are occupied by a quantum vacuum that seethes with quantum frenzy.

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As a violin string’s rate of vibration determines its pitch a superstring’s mode of vibration determines what kind of particle it displays. This is an entirely mew way of understanding how subatomic particles come to be, and it lends an almost tactile quality to the phrase “fabric of space”. Of course, nothing on this infinitesimal scale is tactile, and string theory, at this juncture, remains a set of elegant mathematical abstractions in pursuit of experimental proof. Still, the notion of a universe of harmonious vibrations is sublime, and it meshes with some very ancient spiritual concepts. Could the deceptively plain fabric through which the loops are drawn be the fertile ground of the primary field?

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Phenomena such as black holes and particles that flit in and out of existence cause us to question the stability of the world around us. Indeed, a measure of existential uncertainty may be the price of intellectual maturity, for it is a maturity that brings with it a high degree of anxiety. We sometimes doubt the solidness of the ground beneath our feet.

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Why “quantum meditation”? Is this simply a twenty-first- century repackaging of something as old as the hills? In part, the answer is yes. The fundamental process of meditation does not vary, whether it is labeled Transcendental Meditation, qigong, mindfulness, or tai chi. Dr. Herbert Benson clearly elucidated these techniques for Western readers in 1975 in The Relaxation Response. This little book became a big best seller and legitimized for many Americans the practices embraced a decade earlier by the Beatles under the tutelage of their guru. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation.

Benson, a cardiologist and researcher at Harvard Medical School, discovered a connection between stress and high blood pressure. Every day conflicts tend to trigger our instinctive fight- or- flight response, signaling the brain to release massive quantities of hormones like adrenaline and increase blood flow to the muscles. This hardwired reflex, a function of the autonomic nervous system and some of the oldest parts of the brain, is very useful when facing a charging lion, but considerably less so when facing an angry boss. In most of the stress- producing situations we face today, it is not appropriate to either fight or flight, so we stew in our own juices, damaging our mental and physical health. Is it then any surprise that stress has become such a killer in our society?

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Advantages of meditation:- The physical effects of meditation include reducing the heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen consumption; lowering production of stress hormones and blood lactates; and bolstering the immune system. These are the fringe benefits in this meditation compensation package. The real earnings are in the effect upon consciousness itself: during meditation a quantum leap into a different stated with an associated feeling of immense bliss, and afterwards the ability to act with a great clarity of mind and an innate sense of fulfillment.

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In spite of abundant scientific evidence revealing the power of our minds over our bodies, most people still seem to ignore it. A careful look at the evidence should persuade you that consciousness can heal, and your efforts will bring a higher degree of coherence in your consciousness. Once you get a taste of the experience, you will know for sure that an innocuous process like meditation can bring a profound change in the quality of your life.

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Similarly, a diet anchored in whole grains and fruit will do more than any over-the counter antacid to temper indigestion and engender a feeling of well being. It is hard to hear our minds, let alone the hum of the cosmos, when our stomachs are rumbling. Gandhi managed quite well-across thousands of miles and through numerous hunger strikes- on raisins, nuts, and goat’s milk. But we needn’t go to that extreme. Just keep it light.

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Scientists like psychologist Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and physicist Henry Stapp, as well as repeated studies of places like MIT and the National Institute of Mental Health, have extensively documented what happens in your brain during mindfulness meditation. Brain circuitry is quite literally being remapped.

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Neurons that normally fire in response to outside stimuli are now firing in phase with your own volition. If you doubt this, there is plenty of fMRI ( functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET scan data to back it up. The prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes have taken control of the helm away from the lower brain functions. When you are able to achieve this state consistently, you are ready for quantum meditation.

Then mind is most at home when it refers only to itself, to what the Vedic lexicon calls the Atman and the Western mystics have called the ground of being. Meditation is not a matter of striving, but of setting the stage for the mind to return to its most coherent, natural, and least excited state, to, in the words of Meister Eckhart, “Get out of the way and let God be God in you”. Meditation is, by the way, also the mind’s most blissful state, as evidenced by the significant rise of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain chemistry. Serotonin is the same neurotransmitter that the popular anti-depressant Prozac manipulates.

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Recall that a laser beam consists of a swarm of light photons marshaled into a state of coherence (technically, the wavelike properties of all the photons are in perfect phase). In this state, the individual photons give up their individuality and become a new form of light in which each acts to reinforce the others.

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Before this state is reached, however, there is a gradual build up from what laser scientists call super-radiance, seeds of coherence that sprout when the laser medium begins to self- generate coherent light. Eventually a single coherent process takes over and lasing begins (coherent light is emitted). Likewise, the mind in deep meditation reaches a crossover point where all the momentum favors a quantum leap into perfect coherence. We just need to nourish the seed of higher coherence and let it spontaneously spread by maintaining attention to what is going on in the frontal part of our brain.

If we could see a dashboard display of what is happening in our brains as we practice meditation, we might observe the following: The gauge that meters our brain’s left parietal region, where body image is formed, shows a significant decrease in activity. The boundary between our skin and the rest of the world has, mentally speaking, dissolved. The gauge monitoring our brain’s right parietal function, which orients our bodies in space and time, shows a similar drop off. We no longer occupy fixed coordinates; we are “nonlocal”. Our brain’s right prefrontal lobe, the seat of worry and anxiety, is idling, while our brain’s left side, the locus of joy, alertness and enthusiasm, is surging with activity.

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Of course, the forgoing is something of an oversimplification, but the general picture is neurologically accurate. As you become more adept at meditation, you will come to recognize these readings, and you will know that this is the time to cease any counting or object- oriented concentration. Your sole focus will be on making a fertile place for the seed of perfect coherence to sprout and spread its roots, and, with time, it will bud and you will feel yourself blissfully expanding, dissolving, and connecting. You may weep, but they won’t be tears of sorrow or stress. You will weep because you have come home.

The more you practice this technique, the longer you will be able to sustain your Quantum Zeno Effect. A possible EEG reading may eventually show hat all regions of our brains, down to the most ancient, are in phase coherence or synchrony when we are in resonance with the fundamental source of existence. The senses have become one sense; the sources of sensation have become one source. To characterize this feeling merely as “happiness” is to understate its depth, but most of us- spiritual refugees in a world that gives us a new cause for grief each day- will find ourselves quite happy even to be merely happy, and , moreover, to have found a room in our minds from which fear has fled. You have harnessed power from the coherence. There is strength in coherent laser light, and there is power in our brain’s perfect coherence.

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For those inclined to label such an experience as an ‘Eastern thing’ , the same PET scan studies that led to the forgoing conclusions were conducted in 2001 with a group of Franciscan nuns, and with the same results.

Meditation’s documented aftereffects on physical and mental health are too numerous to catalog here, but the new science of psychoneuroimmunology, pioneered by Norman Cousins and his personal discoveries, has established not only the cited influence on blood pressure and stress hormones but an influence o the production of antibodies against disease. A study conducted with two groups of workers receiving a flu vaccine, one group meditating and the other not, found that the leftward tilt in the meditator’s brain activity promoted a more beneficial response to the vaccine.

Potentially even more important for our species is meditation’s link to neuroplasticity, our brain’s ability to remodel itself on the fly in response to learning and experience. The brain is not a static entity but a factory of creation in which neural components such as actin filaments are being replaced at rates as frequent as every 40 seconds. Neurobiologist Michael Ehlers at Duke University Medical Center infers from a recent study that “synapses are completely turning over all of their constituents multiple times a day- a stunning finding.” And, from emerging information, neuroscientists estimate that the entire brain is recycled on a bi-monthly basis! Yet, remarkably, our blueprint remains ever present, and meditation’s effects on that blueprint appear to make a permanent stamp on the brain, perhaps by changes in gene expression.

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Once meditation becomes a regular feature in our lives, the sense that we are part of something much larger than our individual selves remains with us.

But what do we call this larger something we sense when our minds are perfectly coherent? What did the great German mystic Meister Eckhart mean when he claimed that in spiritual rapture he saw himself with the eye of his Creator? Why do the Vedic rishis quietly assert, from the deep well of contemplation, “I am Brahman?” Could it be that the timeless mystical experience of oneness with the source, an experience that transcends all faiths and cultures, is actually the closest we humans can ever come to perceiving the universe as it truly is?

I would argue that it is the universal potentiality of consciousness that we resonate with when we tap the mind’s well. We access the very power behind all existence, a power that is encrypted everywhere in the foundation of space itself. It is the power of one source, the order that underlies and enfolds all orders, that unifies all fields and forms, as well as consciousness, and it will not, by now, surprise you to hear my assertion that we call this source by its code name: God.

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