Stumbling upon Consciousness

I was intrigued by an excellent documentary by Prof Jim Al-Khalili from University of Surrey, called ‘Everything and Nothing’ where he covered the phenomenon of how particles can emerge out of vacuum or nothing, as long they come out in pairs of a positive and negative charge. He caveated that this is an unexplained phenomenon and it seemed that there is an underlying force or energy which drives behaviour of quantum particles as well as their creation. I remembered the famous quote of Max Planck, way back in the 1930s:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Many scientists have been undertaking extensive research in this field, some of them diverging from the lines of particle physics. Quantum physicist David Bohm and neuroscientist Karl Pribram in their Pribram-Bohm Holoflux Theory of Consciousness, provided an explanation of how the underlying non-local, beyond space-time consciousness energy (called ‘implicate order’ by David Bohm) translates to more local forms (called ‘explicate order’). The field of ‘zero-point energy’ is the current attempt by scientists to reconcile the matter-energy duality.

Sri Aurobindo provides a more comprehensive and elaborate explanation of how consciousness is fundamental to everything in the universe. Building on the knowledge of the ancient Indian scriptures, he describes how creation arises from the Consciousness-Force (‘Chit-Shakti’ in Sanskrit) of the Omnipresent Reality, which translates a Real-Idea into the triune of subject-action-object. This consciousness is present in everything from the tiniest matter to the highest planes of the mind, in different proportions in the manifestation of the universe. Sri Aurobindo’s explanation provides a far better clarity than the endeavours of science, which tries to describe and justify phenomenon observed by the sense-mind. One then remembers the importance of another great quote by Max Planck:

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”