Science means knowledge. Religion means an awakened experience—a flowering. For others, religion is a set of beliefs. In fact, science is pure religion and religion is pure science. But somehow, humanity is caught up in the understanding that science has found and religion is caught up in interpretations of what awakened ones have once said.
In knowing, emerges an understanding. Knowing happens through a state of deep learning when an unknown phenomenon about the nature of things around us is known. Learning happens when the unknown is known. In the quest for science, humanity has met a dead religion, and in the quest for religion, humanity has met a dead science.
J. Krishnamurti has said, “the observer is the observed.” Science in that parlance hypothesises that quanta respond to an observer and that the neutrons, electrons, and protons are conscious beings, otherwise the cell won’t have the actuality of itself.
Don’t get caught up in the words. Don’t become an observer of your consciousness that is being observed by you intellectually. That’s again the trick of the mind. The mind becomes the observer and the observed too. It says, “Yes, I want to be the observer of the observed.”
What it actually means to be the observer of the observed is to be in the being-ness of the being. Everything that you observe returns to you to reinforce your being-ness. The real observer is not observing himself. Observing by being the observer. Observer object observation is lost. Being in being-ness is revealed.
What began as an idea of absolute knowledge becoming a virtue has become an unprovable set of scientific theories aping scriptures today. This is sacrilegious to science. Science cannot explain what was before the Big Bang, therefore it cannot explain what was after the Big Bang. Science has become exactly like religion. Like who made God? So, God made God.
Science says before the Big Bang, there was another Big Bang. If Science were to inquire as to why the Universe is expanding and what it is expanding into, A night is required to explain why what is not a night is a day. So, science invented a reverse theory of the Big Bang. The Big Bang: If something is expanding, it must have started, and the beginning is the Big Bang. Bang is the theory invented by the scientists who believed in religious thought that the universe was expanding like Brahma and science had superimposed the theoretical physicists’ vision on them as if they were expanding into their own expansion. God? But no one is able to answer that.
Science has so far known which part of the brain does what and what the architecture of the brain is. Science might know which part of the brain is a repository of optical neurons which create vision. But science does not know how an observer observes the beauty of the world through vision. When asked, one gets an absurd answer like chemicals and matter in certain mathematical proportions may mean beauty. How do droplets of rain on the scorched soil produce an earthy fragrance experience? No scientist in the world can explain how neurons in the brain signal beauty or how one feels the experience of fragrance. How does one feel ecstasy? “Science here is a blindfolded religious belief.
But religion is an absolute science. When you live your life according to the doctrines of some priests or philosophers, the names of Gods and beliefs paralyse and blind you.
Beliefs are like an inevitability. Your mind thinks you will die at the average human age. That’s a trick of the mind. You may believe that you may not die at 100, and believe me, you will not. The age that you are in is your own belief. You are not 20 or 50 or 70. You live the age you believe in. You will die at the age you want to die at. That’s what Jesus has ordained. Jesus knew that he would be resurrected, and he did. Beliefs are in your mind. Belief works like hypnosis that seals the mind from outside stimuli. When you are free from the known past, you are free from beliefs too.
For centuries, the mind has been observing the universe. Science agrees that without an observer, the cosmos would not exist. Like without ears, sound won’t last and without light, eyes won’t. All our senses are drawn out of our consciousness and the physical body that shaped them. An observer observes an observation. The observer observes the observation and finds that the observation that he observes is not the observation. But it meets his consciousness alone.
Consciousness is the biggest dilemma of science that remains unexplainable. What is consciousness? Science avoids this question. Neuroscience has dissected the brain, and psychologists have dissected the mind. How does a brain, which is a physical entity, and a mind, which is a psychological entity, create an experience which is experienced by someone who is not the brain and the mind?
The days of artificial intelligence (AI) are here. People believe that computing machines will be conscious like humans because of the Singularity. We are not far but light years far from that era. Of course, in films and thoughts, it is discussed.
Our minds and our senses are the result of billions of years of existence. The human mind created its own existence in time and space. mind is grown to produce experiences of time and space. When we interact with the physical world, it produces sensations. Our minds produce experiences out of sensations. When you see a new car, you touch it. Your mind comes in. It imagines you in the car. A desire is birthed by it. And you want to buy the car. Desire creates an artificial need.
The mind serves as your interface for generating natural experiences. Consciousness is the observer of the experience produced by the mind. When the observer becomes the observed-mind, the lost pure consciousness flowers. A religion is birthed as a pure science. It happened to Buddha-the awakened one. Buddha observed the mind for six years. If the observer is free from the mind’s accumulated past, that’s when the observer is the ‘observed’.
A computer is governed by the thoughts of its owner. The human mind is a kind of aircraft black box that registers all movements in space and time through the senses. Even if a computer far away apes the human mind and is directed to produce uninterrupted random thoughts and to act on them, it will be a mind. But it will continue to act according to the mind that directed it.
But consciousness is something beyond the human mind. “Mind cannot happen without consciousness. Because the mind draws its existence on the canvas of consciousness, The mind is a psychological entity, and the brain is physical. The mind is built by time and space.
The birth of the universe is mentioned in the Rig Veda’s hymn ‘Nisadiya Sukta’ 5000 years ago. Neither non-existence nor existence existed. Neither the realm of space nor the sky. A different kind of darkness. Like a primal seed, heat generates light. And creation began.’
The cosmos is made by the observer. Without an observer, there is no comprehension. Without comprehension, there is no existence. Consciousness is existence. The Universe came into existence from consciousness. Hindus believe in a Triune God. Brahma is the creator. Vishnu, the preserver. Shiva, the destroyer. A creator, a preserver, and a destroyer are all entwined in the same body. all three denote the creation. It is creation that is creating, preserving, and destroying. Consciousness pervades the whole of the universe. The Universe is the body of an absolute mind of creation. When the universe meets consciousness, creation begins.
The author is a spiritual teacher. He can be reached at arunavlokitta@gmail.com.