Revelation of Reality Vedanta and Modern Science

By Dinesh Bhargava

This book is for those in quest of Reality. The first two chapters deal with the Origin and Process of Creation.
Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicists and others of the twentieth-century had their first non-sensory experience of reality, as the Mystics did. The models of modern physics became akin to those of Eastern philosophy.

Modern science has discovered a reality beyond the physical world, endorsing ancient Vedic teachings of Illusion, that Truth or Reality does not lie in what is seen but in what is unseen.

Vedanta deals with the Origen and the Beginning of Creation. Science based on material objectivity does not deal with the Origen of the universe, but only describes the early beginnings and evolutions, after the event. Science needs to build upon something that is “already there”- CRNS Scientist.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence” - Nikolai Tesla.

The book refers to the world at a deeper level, and describes the Sub-structure, the Absolute Substance and the Ground of all Existence. It describes how Mind creates matter by dissolving the distinction between subject and object through acts of conscious observation and interaction.

The microscopic quantum world is hidden from us the way the operation of the brain is hidden. Just as in the brain, an emerging image, say of an elephant, is the visible end-point of billions of invisible processes at work, so in the all-encompassing universal quantum field the material world is the visible end-point of trillions of invisible processes at work.

Modern Science is changing western thinking to converge with the revelations of the ancient seers. Ironically, it is the same science that once killed the notion of God in man that is now strengthening mankind's belief in a 'Supreme Being.'

From here on, Nature, Man and God all seem to converge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dinesh Bhargava
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636066455

Dinesh Bhargava

D.C. Bhargava had his first contact with Sri Sathya Sai Baba when he saw vibhuti(sacred ash) formed on His photo in a devotee’s home in Calcutta, in 1972.Thereafter, he has had several personal experiences of Sai Baba in his life.In 1980, he translated a letter in Spanish from a devotee in Lima, Peru to a devotee in New Delhi, communicating Sai Baba’s desire to spread His Message and Teachings in Latin America. The result is for all to see. The spirit of Sai has swept Latin America like wild fire although the people there speak Spanish, are almost entirely Catholic and with hardly any Indian population.As a 5-year old child, the author was sent by his parents to a British-American Seventh-Day Adventist boarding school in the Himalayan foothills and, subsequently, to an American Jesuit School. He grew up in the forest-clad hills amidst beautiful and serene natural surroundings, which developed in him a lifelong love for Nature.The school was unique in that it had no auxiliary staff. To teach students the dignity of labor, both boys and girls had to do an hour of manual work each day; the boys cleaned the buildings, worked in the bakery and chopped wood for the boilers, while the girls prepared food and washed dishes under the supervision of a Matron.In those far off days, all teachers and almost all students were from foreign lands, yet only vegetarian food was served; all lived together like one family, which helped to lay the foundation for building up character and imbibing the basic human values of Truth, Right Living, Love, Peace and Non-violence to which this book makes frequent reference.Hence, in view of the Author’s education and upbringing, his approach to the book and his choice of narratives should appeal to both Western and Indian readers.The author has published another book titled Revelation of Reality (Vedanta and Modern Science); he has also translated several books from French, Spanish and Italian languages into English. He is a retired senior Company Executive and ex-Company Director. While his two daughters live in the US and Canada, he and his wife live in New Delhi, India.

Book preview

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN OF CREATION

In the beginning, there was neither existence nor nonexistence: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. All this world was unmanifest energy… The ONLY One breathed breathless by Itself; other than IT there nothing since has been"… Rig-Veda

Originally there was no distinction between the subject and the object, when the seer was not distinguishable from the seen. Therefore, in the absence of objectivity or the presence of subjectivity, which is the origin of things, what was there where there was no distinction between the seer and the seen, where the one co-mingled with the other, where one entered the other, where the two could not be distinguished? Originally, nothing was there, because our idea of ‘something’ is an ‘object’. There is no object present, because the object enters the subject, and vice versa. What was there, then? If nothing was there, surely it cannot be defined in any way?

So, the cause must have contained the effect in a primordial state; and, therefore, nothing can be visualised in the effect which could not have been in the cause. In a sense, therefore, what is in the effect is what is in the cause. The effect is the cause. There is no final distinction between the effect and the cause, inasmuch as in substance they are the same. But yet, we make a distinction between the two.

Before the creation of the universe, there was absolutely nothing; at the same time that nothingness was full of an indescribable "something’ which is not a thing. For this ‘something’ of formless nature neither has science based on material form any answer nor is our consciousness evolved enough to know.

The Cause Is That Which Pervades The Effect

Swami Swaroopananda, Global Head of Chinmaya Mission, asks the question – what is the cause of the world? If there is an effect, there must be a cause. Likewise, even in Physics, Chemistry or Biology we are trying to find the cause behind matter and energy, or the cause of all elements, or the very origin of life itself.

Cause and effect

So, what is the cause of this universe? Science is searching for it. Philosophers are speculating on it. But the one major mistake we make is in our pattern of thinking; we are trying to find the cause of the world as a part of the world. Today, in spite of the advancement in science and technology, we are still actively involved in the material sciences and their utility. We are searching for a particle for the cause of this world and erroneously concluding that a change in a particle or many such particles put together caused the world. This is the perspective of material science.

A particle of the world cannot be the ultimate cause of the world. A part of the world is not the cause of the world because the part itself is an effect. Let us look towards spiritual science. Consciousness is energy, but energy is not consciousness. In the Bhagwad Gita, chapter 9 verse 4, Krishna says: It is I who pervade all the names and forms of this entire universe that is experienced by anyone.

It is everywhere

The Cause is that which pervades the effect. When we say that gold is the cause of all gold ornaments, it indicates that it is present in all of them. The effect is dependent upon the cause; the cause is not dependent upon the effect. Therefore, Krishna states: They are in me, I am not in them.

That cause, which pervades everything and everyone, is the ultimate cause of this universe. It is not a tiny particle. It is that which permeates the entire cosmos. It is that from which everything gets its existence. It is that ‘one Truth’ that the wise call by many names.

WHAT SCIENCE SAYS

Modern Science says that 13.7 billion years ago, the universe emerged from a singularity – a point of extremely dense and hot concentration of energy – through a short incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, creating in the process time, space and matter; the whole universe expanded after the creation of time and space and became more and more organized and complex. The universe got differentiated into matter as the temperature of the universe cooled down; this led to the emergence of elementary particles of matter such as quarks and electrons that formed atoms and molecules, which further caused creation of stars, galaxies, planets, the beginning of life on Earth up to the birth of human beings.

This is as far as science can take us. Let us see how further back Vedanta takes us.

Only Vedanta Metaphysics along with Modern Science based on Quantum Physics can provide the concept as to who or what was there before the ‘Big Bang’, based on the logical application of Quantum Physics’ concept of the Observer and the Observed and the wave function, described later.

Synthesis of Science and Spirituality

Fundamentally, Science began from ‘out there’ and then moved inwards to locate the hidden reality in the quantum world. Vedanta began from ‘in here’ and after that moved out wards to comprehend the universe. A definitive objective for the two is the same.

Today Science and Spirituality have shed their respective prejudices and come closer to each other. Explaining the cause of the misunderstanding between science and religion, Swami Vivekananda said:

Religion deals with the truths of the metaphysical world, just as chemistry and the other natural sciences deal with the truth of the physical world. The book one must read to learn chemistry is the book of (external) nature. The book from which to learn religion is your own mind and heart. The sage is often ignorant of physical science, because he reads the wrong book – the book within and the scientist is too often ignorant of religion, because he, too, reads the wrong book – the book without.

The great thinkers of the Upanishads (often known as Vedanta, the quintessence of the Vedas) discovered that the universe of experience consists of two broad categories, the Subjective and the Objective. Modern science is the study of only one of the two categories, namely, the objective (material) field. But modern science is now also trying to understand the subjective field.

When we study the development of science during the last hundred years, we can trace the slow emergence of a non-materialistic outlook in science.

Modern Physics and Philosophical Reason

Physicists of the first quarter of the twentieth century were faced with revolutionary discoveries of relativity and quantum physics. Starting with Nobel Prize-winning Physicists Eddington, Jeans, Max Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, and other great creators of twentieth-century physics, they all turned into bold philosophical thinkers.

The fundamental search for reality took man beyond the senses and the sensory world of physical phenomena. The Austrian – born American Physicist Fritjof Capra says:

On this journey to the world of the infinitely small, the most important step, from a philosophical point of view, was the first one: the step into the world of atoms. Probing inside the atom and investigating its structure, science could no longer rely with absolute certainty on logic and common sense. Atomic physics provided the scientists with the first glimpses of the essential nature of things. Like the mystics, physicists were now dealing with a non-sensory experience of reality. From then on, therefore, the models and images of modern physics became akin to those of Eastern philosophy.

A 2-metre tall Indian Nataraja statue symbolizing Lord Shiva’s cosmic dance, the source of creation and destruction, now stands at the entrance of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research Hadron Collider in Geneva. While referring to the Shiva’s dance, Capra drew a parallel between Shiva’s dance and the dance of subatomic particles; a significant visual interpretation of Brahman.

Astronomer Carl Sagan said that he liked to imagine the Nataraja as a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.

As pointed out by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the founders of quantum theory, there are direct parallels between quantum theory and Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism: The great scientific contributions in theoretical physics… has a relationship between the philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory.

Space is not empty

In the Eastern view, the reality underlying all phenomena is beyond all forms and defies all description and specification. Reality is, therefore, often said to be formless, empty, or void. But this emptiness is not to be taken for mere nothingness. It is, on the contrary, the essence of all forms and the source of all life. The void or emptiness is just another name for the formless Supreme Being or Divine Consciousness, which is beyond all description.

Similarly, modern science has discovered that the substance of this projected Universe is energy that fills all apparent empty space which is pervaded by unmanifest quantum fields of Nature’s primal forces of electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity. These fields constantly borrow energy from space creating pairs causing constant creation and annihilation of particles. This implies that space is not empty or a void but a seething cauldron of frenetic electromagnetic activity.

Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today; the latest conclusions of science endorse what Vedanta has been saying for ages. There is an essential harmony between the spirit of Eastern wisdom and Western science.

THE BIG BANG

Today, we know that in the beginning, that is, almost 14 billion years ago this universe existed in a state of singularity, that is, Nature’s primal forces of electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity were unified.

Let us see what Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, A journey through Space and Time, illuminatingly writes on the Big Bang Theory.

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The Singularity has no space around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there – whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

Bryson, continuing, cautions against perceiving the Big Bang as a massive explosion out of which the universe emerged. Instead, he states that it was "a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. In this state everything was in a singularity, and in this state laws of physics break down. Then space-time began at big bang singularity and the universe passed through a phase of inflationary expansion.

Physicists today continue to rattle their brains with the question of how the universe began and whether the laws of physics alone are enough to explain its creation from nothing. Could the universe have been created without the assistance of a Divine Hand?," Some biologists have plainly acknowledged the inextricable link between these questions and a Divine Hand. Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001, that These are very close to religious questions.

According to Vedanta’s version of the Big Bang, Brahman, the highest Universal Principle and Ultimate Reality is the furthest stop where we get off by travelling backwards in time-space to 13.7 billion years ago.

Prior to the so-called ‘Big Bang’ there was nothing existing; absolutely nothing to exist. A thing needs space around it to exist in; to be is to be in space, but there was no space. The primeval ‘fireball’ which inflated and expanded to become the universe did not exist in a space, but, on