“David Bohm brought to physics and the scientific world the understanding that had propelled mystics and sages since the dawn of time. Rejecting the idea that particles do not exist until they are observed, he, like the Nobel laureate and renowned physicist Brian Josephson, understood that physics must see the nature of subatomic reality in a new way. It is not simply that conscious perspective affects the nature of the subatomic quanta, Bohm revealed, but that the subatomic quanta is conscious, which means that everything is conscious, even inanimate objects and seemingly empty space, the very definition, if one were possible, of mystical or spiritual reality.”
Does this mean that Schrodinger’s cat would remain alive even when no one was looking at it?
Now, a sceptic asks – How is consciousness defined and identified at the subatomic level?
David Lewis in ‘The physicist as mystic’ in ‘Forbidden history’ (ed. by Douglas Kenyon) continues. “Matter, according to the avant-garde of subatomic physics, cannot ultimately be separated from what appears to be empty space. It is, rather, a part of space, and part of a deeper, invisible order from which reality’s unseen conscious essence precipitates, as material form, and then returns to the invisible again. Space, then, is not empty, but instead filled with highly concentrated conscious energy, the source of everything in existence.”
Lewis continues: “In ‘The Holographic Universe,’ an elaboration upon the implication of Bohm’s genius, Michael Talbot describes all of material creation as a ‘ripple … a pattern of excitation in the midst of an imaginably vast ocean.’ Talbot goes on to say, paraphrasing Bohm, that, ‘ despite its apparent materiality and apparent size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable.’”
Conceptually, this can be inspiring. But what does all this mean in explaining the universe that we humans experience?
For years, I have felt that insightful, speculative philosophers in physics in the Western world have been influenced by the mystics of the East. The concepts are somewhat similar. Yet, to understand the Cosmos, supported by some reliable knowledge, we need to go further than the mystics. This understanding needs to be transmissible. It cannot be beyond words.
Yet, Bohm and others are taking us beyond the current mechanistic material paradigm into the ethereal realm. We do need a new methodology. Will we be able to develop one? Or, will we remain mystical at a speculative philosophical level?
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 