Atma and Reality

ATMA

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

Look into the night sky. We see the same stars and constellations that were observed by Greek astronomers eons ago. We see the stars and wonder: what if the stars could see us?

Is the universe sentient? Is the cosmos aware? Scientists are unsure of the true nature of consciousness. How we think and feel is still a mystery in spite of all attempts to decode the mind and create an artificial intelligence. If consciousness exists it seems to pervade everything. But how can life exist in the vastness of space?

In trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe we must consider: is space a new frontier or the gateway to timeless wisdom? Can it be possible that in our attempts to reach for the stars we shall finally discover the inner self?

The light you see from the stars is millions of miles distant. In fact, some of the stars in the night sky burned into supernovas centuries ago, but their light still reaches us. What you see with your eyes no longer exists. Their light is only fugitive energy from a once proud star.

Remarking on the almost supernatural power of music, Shakespeare once remarked, "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" We invest almost supernatural power in mathematics. In fact our understanding of the physical reality of our universe is based on mathematics: It is a mathematical model of dead starlight. Astronomy is supposed to be a hard science, based on objectivity. But mind and matter are inseparable. And if we cannot objectively discover how mind and matter interact, then how far is subjectivity responsible for our analysis of reality? How can we know the universe if we do not know the self?

Given the materialist bent of conventional thought we begin with material reality and mind evolves out of matter. But the words mind and matter are no more than conventions. We must dive deeper to know the truth. What we hear, smell, taste, and touch is supposed to be "matter," but in many ways this concrete reality is a mental construct. We use the word "mind" to describe a wide swath of conscious phenomenon from mere sentience to emotion, humor, mood, thinking and cognitive function. But what is the true "stuff" of reality? How is it constructed? Where does it come from? And does it have any meaning?

Astronomy is the hardest of science: we study space dust eons old at the final frontiers of the universe. But then even the stars we see in our telescopes are mental constructs. Millions of light years hence many of these stars have already faded into oblivion. We examine their light as through a time machine, but the stars themselves are gone. We study long lost stars, knowing that these lights that still guide our ships no longer exist. The Hubble Space Telescope, for example, can see objects that existed only in the past. When we see a picture of a galaxy 100 million light years away we are in a sense traveling through time; we see that star system as it looked millions of years ago. How it looks today is impossible to know. Some of those stars have long since ceased to be active. They have exploded into supernovas millions of years ago and yet their light still reaches us, telling the story of a reality that no longer exists. 

While their stars burned out long ago, their light is real. And what will remain of our own sun, a million years hence? Long after the sun explodes, the light from own solar system will survive for millions of years into the future as it is beamed across the universe. Radio waves traveling at the speed of light will carry news of the first atomic wars beyond Alpha Centauri and past the Dog Star into the Orion Nebula thousands of years after the earth planet has ceased to exist. Our beamed earthly TV programs and Twitter musings will penetrate far-off planets long after this world has faded into oblivion.

Will extra-terrestrial life-forms have the intelligence to decode our civilization based on the evidence of radio waves millions of years hence? Will they be able to reconstruct our own reality as easily as we pretend to deconstruct the mysteries of the Big Bang?

And what, in any real sense, will remain of what you now see and hear and feel? The 3rd law of thermodynamics is called entropy. The idea is that any organized system tends to disorganize over time. Science tells us that the entire space-time continuum will erode into chaos, leaving nothing more than an empty, motionless void; a vast sea of nothing. In that weird nirvana time will no longer exist and space will have no content.

Our imaginary extra-terrestrial watching reruns of would be disappointed to learn that the earth no longer exists. He would certainly feel cheated if he could travel at warp speed to find a vacuum in place of a solar system. Where great civilizations once ruled he would see nothing but space dust. How easy then to conclude that it was all a lie, an illusion, a strange hologram. But if nonexistence was the rule before the universe came into being, and if everything ends in nonexistence, how could anything be said to exist? In the end our reality of concrete matter is no more than a momentary illusion, a kind of hologram.

If consciousness really is the background of all reality, the idea of a hologramatic universe is not as far-fetched as it appears to be. Our own human brain constructs a 4-dimensional hologram of reality. This version of reality is reinforced by social conditioning and a kind of mass hypnosis into an interpretation of matter, space and time.

Time is an especially difficult problem; it is certainly an aspect of this hologramatic reality; but if nothing existed in the past and nothing exists in the future, how can anything be “real”? If a thing has no existence in the future, if it had no existence in the past, how does it have any concrete existence at all? Time would seem to give meaning to existence, but while science may try to understand how and even why things work, science is neutral when it comes to meaning. To understand how things work is a different task from understanding what they mean. And insofar as science ignores meaning it ignores what it is to be human.

But as humans it is only natural for us to wonder what things mean. The French Philosopher Albert Camus felt that since life has no meaning the noblest act would be suicide. His point of view animated much of the 20th Century and continues to be felt today. Insist on the concrete nature of reality all you want. It dissolves for all of us at the moment of our death.

So what is real, after all? We want to believe in concrete reality. But stone turns to dust. What about the subjective nature of reality then? Is that the key to existence and meaning? After all, does dust evolve into consciousness? Or is this entire time and space continuum a kind of quantum hologram that depends on consciousness?

As astronomers gaze into the light of dead stars, quantum physicists in the twentieth century turned their attention to the secrets of the atom. Just as the macrocosm raises important questions about being and the origin of the universe, the microcosm holds powerful mysteries about the subjective nature of existence.

Einstein, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Erwin Schrodinger, and Robert Oppenheimer were strange mystics who unleashed the secrets of the atom. Nuclear weapons and fireballs capable of world destruction were only mythical nightmares until these men showed the practical application of their insights. But while researching the freak movements of electrons and protons they stumbled on the strange world of quantum reality where the line between consciousness and matter blurs. They discovered that observations made at the subatomic level affect the very reality under study. At some point, they found, consciousness determines subatomic reality.

So, is the mind in the world? Or is the world in the mind? Is mind and consciousness a mere product of chemical and electrical transactions created in the human brain? Or does consciousness have an existence apart from physical reality? Consciousness itself becomes what is known as a “hard” problem for science, since its very study enters the realm of the metaphysical.

The 20th century pioneers of quantum physics created a paradigm shift that is not well understood even today. What is the intersecting point between perception and reality? And how is it possible that, in this age of technology, while so much attention has been devoted to how things work , so little has been focused on inner life?

The East has often been dismissed by the West as “Third World” but yet many ideas born in the east have much to teach us. The ancient yoga philosophy of India, for example, has gradually gained in popularity throughout Europe and the Americas. This is, in part, because the Vedanta and its essential commentary the Bhgavata provides us with a remarkably supple and flexible way of seeing into the self, the atma, and beyond.

The Vedanta was known to the quantum physicists and atomic scientists of the 20th Century. According to its synthesis, material reality exists as a kind of mass hypnosis. The time-space continuum, in this view, is a function of what is called Atma--the stuff of being.

Atma may be translated as consciousness, but this is misleading. Since consciousness is a “hard” problem, different disciples define consciousness in terms of its phenomenological functions. Again, since science is interested in “how things work” and not in “what things mean,” the “problem” of consciousness becomes a question of defining its functions.

So, we find that “consciousness” in scientific language becomes divided into such terms as “sentience, awareness, nervous reaction,” even “thinking, cognition, metacognition.” If all of these can be mimicked by machines then they have no metaphysical component. If a machine can be made to “think” or “feel” then the problem of metaphysics ceases to exist. This has been the life mission of many geniuses at important universities and corporations internationally.

The destruction of metaphysics is an important mission, since the absence of metaphysics means that we no longer need “meaning.” Scientists often feel a prick of conscience when reminded that their research focuses not on meaning but exploitation. The consequence of 150 years of petroleum exploitation, for example, has left the world devastated. But since the time of Comte and Spencer, we have been reminded that “meaning” is not a part of science. The attempt to kill metaphysics through analysis dates back to the conflict between Plato and Aristotle. Plato felt that it was important to consider the ideal world. Aristotle was convinced that it was sufficient to classify the workings of the “real” world. Aristotle is known as the first scientist.

Plato and Aristotle

The destruction of metaphysics extends to problem of consciousness when it is determined that there is no need to search for our inner self. The inner self as such does not exist, since after all we are only talking about various functions of an organism.

Awareness is one function, sentience another. Self-awareness may be a higher-level function. But functions are verbs, what a thing does. Western thought finds that as long as we define consciousness through its effects, there is no need to arrive at its essence.

Vedanta has quite a distinct take. The Atma is a given, an axiomatic truth. It is a simple waste of time to deny one’s own existence in the name of some contorted view of “objectivity.” The 20th Century physicists proved that the dividing line between subject and object disappears at the subatomic level. Western science and philosophy has yet to adapt fully to this finding.

This is, in part, as a consequence of the anti-scientific current in European life as represented by the Church and its followers. Scientific thought since the time of Galileo was persecuted in the West for contradicting religious dogma. The reaction was powerful. Scientists became determined to eradicate metaphysics. But the determination to pursue a political line has also polluted the so-called truth-seekers of science with deleterious effects. The anti-metaphysical dogmas of Western scientism are well-known and prevent true intellectual curiosity. The attempt to destroy consciousness by defining it out of existence is one such example.

If consciousness is not a “pure” scientific definition of Atma, one may look to spiritual texts and consider Atma as “soul,” but the problem is that it also stands for “world-soul” or collective consciousness. The atma is the living force that pre-exists this universe and will survive it when all has turned to ashes.

Vedantic interpretation holds that once the incredible power of Atma is allowed it becomes a facile matter to understand the universe in terms of a hologram, a kind of mass hypnosis quantum multiverse, if you will. 21st century scientists are only beginning to detect “gravity waves.” Gravity is a subtle force that keeps us from floating off the earth planet. It can neither be seen, touched, felt, or tasted. The Atma is not detectable by mind or senses or through such mundane instrumentation as microscopes and telescopes.

Some conception of “atma” is found in Western science and philosophy, but it is generally quite primitive in comparison to the yogic science. French Philosopher Rene Descarte, for example believed in an absolute distinction between what he called “mind” and body and is usually taken as the point of departure for such study. He felt that the mind was located in the pineal gland. The truth is more subtle. How exactly atma interacts with physical reality at the molecular plane is impossible to ferret out, since at some point the process involves too much subjective observation. The truth about the soul is far subtler than the Cartesian paradigm would admit.

Atma, or consciousness, is all-pervading, ever-present, and indestructible. To describe its mechanism is to enter into a tautology, for only through Atma can we observe and discover the nature of Atma. Only through atma can we practice the earthly art of observation and only through sensual observation can we describe the mechanisms that we consider to belong properly to the world of time and space. But since atma exists beyond time and space, this is a hopeless task.

Vision is evidence of the eye, but the eye cannot see itself. We see atma only with atma. Only when the eye of soul is fixed upon the infinite may it begin the true process of self-discovery. But the process of self-discovery exists beyond the scope of mere sensual observation. We may see the self-evident atma by means of consciousness. But we cannot observe consciousness through the senses, since sensual discovery and mental activity operate below the level of consciousness.

Observing the self through mechanistic analysis is something like running outside the house and looking in the windows to try and see yourself at home.

You are much more than you seem to be. There is more to the universe than atoms in the void. Academic rivalry between the followers of Aristotle force us to define biology in terms of physics. But this is a false argument promoted for the sake of dissolving metaphysics. You know who you are. But the ancient yoga school of the Vedanta says, “Go deeper. This life is meant for self-discovery.” Mechanical detection of the atma through physical technology is impossible. But why live under the restrictions of those who would reduce us to mere physical objects?

Conventional wisdom holds that what we know as mind or consciousness or awareness is somehow generated from matter. As such it can give only a partial and distorted idea of reality. After all there are different "states" of consciousness: waking, dream, deep thought, alpha and so on. Which interpretation of reality is correct? The "mind" has an ephemeral quality. Scientists feel it is more "objective" to begin by putting "matter" in the center of their model of reality. According to this model, inorganic matter somehow generates organic biology which "evolves" into higher life forms. While this model is based on a number of speculative and unverifiable assumptions, scientists feel more comfortable with the idea that mind is based on matter than the idea that mind or atma generates the entire material cosmos. Unfortunately for the model, no one has any idea what matter would look like in the absence of mind.

From this perspective, mind is a phenomena or function of matter and has no independent existence. But what if the reverse were true? If we are capable of looking outside the paradigm, we will find quite a different reality, one far more in keeping with our human experience. If we consider the power of consciousness as a separate energy form, more elusive than light or gravity but equally influential, we may find that the world is the product of mind and not the other way around. Were it possible to awaken to the potential of the atma, what would we learn about reality? While conventional science is concerned with unlocking the secrets of how the universe works, what if it were possible to probe the meaning of consciousness? The answers are not easily discovered. But perhaps the questions are worth asking. An interesting place to look is within the mystic system of the Vedanta. The ancient yoga systems and teachings of meditation are worth exploring, for it is in their wisdom teachings that we may find the key to the nature of reality and consciousness.