LIFE – AN ENQUIRY PART- 2

LIFE – AN ENQUIRY  PART- 2

I had ended my last posting on ‘Life-An Enquiry Part-1, The Holographic Universe’ Stating that my enquiry starts with the fundamental idea that has been arrived at by one of the world’s eminent scientists, that “beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness”. This was David Bohm.

Bohm called the world of sensory experience the “explicate order” and its underlying reality the “implicate order.” According to his theory, the universe is a dynamic series of movements—folding into, and unfolding out of, the implicate order.

Karl Pribram in an interview has said, “if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavour many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.

The holographic model, taken to its logical conclusion, could explain a wide range of phenomena such as precognition, telepathy, poltergeists, lucid dreaming, and near death experiences, to say nothing of religious and mystical experiences. The theory is that our brains habitually unfold the implicate order in predictable ways, but as we can change the frequency or angle of a laser beam, perhaps we can experience other places, times, and knowledge—all equally present everywhere in the holomovement—given the right circumstances. This was the major thrust of The Holographic Universe.

Fritz Capra wrote ‘The Tao of Physics’ where he explores the parallels between the findings of modern physics and eastern mysticism. In the epilogue he writes “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both.”

For Carl Jung, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, , which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”.

Jung linked the collective unconscious to  mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind”.

So where does this get us to – David Bohm’s ‘a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness’, Karl Pribram’s ‘the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physicS’ and Carl Jung’s theory of the ‘Collective Unconscious’. Is this the all pervading Brahman of Hindu thought? My enquiry on life will continue.