What’s the Relationship Between Consciousness and Matter?

What’s the Relationship Between Consciousness and Matter?

[00:45] We Seem to Live in a Material Universe

Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles, and today we’re going to talk about the relationship, or to use a more scientific term, the correlation between matter, so-called, and consciousness.

I say matter so-called because when we look at matter and the macroscopic, macroscopic means “No microscopes, thank you,” the stuff we can see and touch and hit our hands against and knock things against and all of that, and make noises, matter collides with matter, and we seem to live in a material universe.

But when we go into the microscopic, micro-micro-microscopic, you know, one million times smaller than what you can see is the molecular level. One million times smaller than the molecular level is the atomic level, the atoms that make up the molecules. One million times smaller than the atomic level is the nuclear level, the nuclei of atoms, the little core of the atom with all the electrons going around it.

One million times smaller than the nuclear level is the level of the quark. The quarks are the things that make the protons and the neutrons that are the nuclei of the atoms. The nuclei of the atoms have all the particles whirling around them. The atoms combining into different electromagnetic and other combinations cause molecules to be extant. And you get enough molecules and you get matter.

A piece of metal hitting a piece of wood [taps ring on wooden table]. Matter. And so what we call matter actually is all fundamentally made up of these itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny particles. And we’re going right down into the sub-nuclear level in our consideration here.

[02:55] Good Vibrations

When, according to my dear friend, Professor Brian McCusker, the former emeritus professor of high-energy nuclear physics at the University of Sydney, we look at what makes up the quarks, the smallest thing, they’re made up of a thing which is either called a lepton or a lepto-quark, and these are particles that come in and out of existence with a frequency, something on the order of 10,000 billion times a second.

That’s what the world’s made of. It’s made of undulations of an underlying field, and that underlying field is sometimes called the quantum field. I prefer a broader title for it, the Unified Field, the field out of which all forms and phenomena appear. And the Unified Field is one indivisible and whole, and we can verify, for the many, many thousands of times, yet again, any day of the week, we can verify in lab science that there are not as many as two things in our universe. What do I mean by that?

There’s only one thing. There’s one thing that is undulating. It vibrates. The one thing has two tendencies, one tendency to be non-vibratory, and its other tendency, which is to vibrate.

When it’s non-vibratory, it is the unmanifest Unified Field, and the part of it that is vibrating is the manifest Unified Field. Unmanifest Unified Field, one indivisible, without any phenomenology in it. There are no things in it, but there’s pure potentiality in it.

[05:01] A Responsive Universe

Like the colorless sap in a flower, it has all the potential to become a petal, but it’s not a petal, it’s colorless sap. It has all the potentiality to make itself into a sharp thorn, but it’s not a sharp thorn, it’s colorless sap. It has the potentiality to become a red petal, but it’s not a red petal, it’s colorless sap.

When it breaks its symmetry and evolves into a thorn or a stem, or a petal or whatever, it is still colorless sap now appearing as a red petal, colorless sap now appearing as a thorn, colorless sap now appearing as a stem. The whole flower is nothing but colorless sap, actually. But the colorless sap is transcendental.

There’s a good word. Transcendental means beyond. The colorless sap is beyond the obvious, but it’s the baseline of all of the elements of the flower.

Unmanifest Unified Field is the baseline of all the particulate and phenomenological relative world. The forces, the fundamental forces, are the phenomenology, and the particulate world are the particles. These particles and these forces simply do not exist unless someone is expecting them to.

And this is a very interesting element of science. When we look at what is the world made up of if nobody’s looking, if there’s no inquiry, if there’s no one attempting to measure what’s there, then we can demonstrate, and it has been done many, many thousands of times beyond reasonable doubt, we can demonstrate that in fact there is no thing there, there’s pure potentiality there.

There’s a field of pure unmanifest probability, a probability function. When you attempt to measure the probability function, the probability function reads your intention by what kind of instrument you’re using, and causes to come into being whatever it is your instrument is searching for.

[07:31] The Hard Question of Consciousness

And so when we look at what causes the world to be, the world that we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear, it turns out to be consciousness. Consciousness having a need for the one indivisible whole unmanifest to come into being in a specific form or in a specific function. Forms, phenomenology, phenomenology being the relationship between the forms, all of these things come into being in response to expectation.

Now, this is not woo-woo stuff I’m teaching you. This is what a good quantum mechanics teacher, a professor of physics, teaches first-year students in their first few lectures when they’re becoming physicists.

This is the part of physics that holds the mystery of what’s referred to as the hard question of consciousness. A hard question in physics doesn’t mean it’s really hard to figure out, or it’s hard like diamonds are hard. Hard means serious. It means rigorous. It means not a soft question. It’s a question that has to be answered and has to be regarded. Consciousness.

And so we go to the question that’s raised rhetorically by Professor McCusker when he trained his first-year physics students. We have laboratory proof that there’s only one thing, one indivisible whole thing. When it undulates, we see forms and phenomena, but there’s also an aspect of it that is non-undulating.

And so, what do we do with consciousness? Rhetorical question. 

“What do we do with consciousness? I am conscious. You are conscious presumably,” he says to his students, some of whom are probably falling asleep. “I’m conscious. You are conscious. Consciousness exists. We’ve just said there’s only one thing. Therefore, all things that exist must be properties of the one, since there are not two things, things that have consciousness and things that do not.

“There’s only one thing. We’ve eliminated the possibility of there being more than one. There’s only one thing, and consciousness exists. Since consciousness exists and there’s only one thing, it must needs be that one of the properties of the one is that it’s consciousness.”

[10:29] The State of Unity Consciousness

So now we can add to our description, one indivisible whole and conscious field is the reality of the Universe. It’s a conscious field. 

Where does the consciousness part of the field end? Well, all potentialities, all properties of the one exist everywhere that the one exists, and where is that? Well, it is all things.

It’s not permeating all things. Permeating and pervading mean there is a thing, like a sponge, a kitchen sponge, that’s permeated with water. So you have the non-water being permeated or pervaded with water. That’s not the Unified Field. In this Unified Field thing, the sponge is Unified Field and the water permeating it is also Unified Field.

There’s nothing that’s non-Unified Field, so we can’t say it’s all-pervasive, it’s all-permeating. No. Unified Field is everything. Unified Field is everything. That means consciousness is everything. It means matter is in fact congealed consciousness. Matter is consciousness, and you the Knower of the matter, also are consciousness.

To what extent is your consciousness able to penetrate through the illusion that matter is non-consciousness? This is the question before us. And there is a state of consciousness in which our perceptual capability becomes so acute that we can detect in matter, in all matter, the same consciousness that makes up oneself, the Knower.

“I the Knower am the consciousness field, and using my perceptual talents, taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, I can perceive myself, my transcendental consciousness, in every object, whatever the object may be. Whether it is a living object, biological, or a non-living object, my consciousness is in that object, and I can experience it.”

This is a state of consciousness known as Unity Consciousness. It comes about spontaneously as a product of regular practice of Vedic Meditation.

[13:15] Sharpening Our Sensory Acuity with Vedic Meditation

In Vedic Meditation, we get to a chair twice a day, first thing in the morning before starting the day, and allow our individual awareness to merge with Cosmic unmanifest Unified Field. A few moments of that, and then coming out back into activity again, saturated with that Unified Field quality enlivened inside of our individual consciousness.

The day goes on, and there are advantages in being a meditator, which are well described, and then diving back into that Unified Field technology during our next meditation, experiencing the unboundedness, and then reemerging into regular waking state and getting through our dinner and the evening and all of that.

One of the advantages of diving deeply into the technique of Vedic Meditation is the sharpening of our sensory acuity. Acuity is a word which, if we could use another word that’s not really a word or coin one, we would say acuteness, but the proper word for acuteness is acuity.

How acutely, how finely can you hear? What’s the faintest sound you can hear? How faintly, how finely can you discriminate between one tone and another tone that’s not quite it, but very close to it? There’s acuity, auditory discrimination, faint-tone discrimination, low-frequency discrimination, high-frequency discrimination.

Getting into the visual field, what’s the faintest reflection of light that you can detect with your human eye? The average for a very faint, faint star in the night sky, the faintest star most people can see, has 90 photons inside of its wave package. 

So if light travels in a wave form and inside of those waves, there’s a certain number of photons, photons are particles of light, when you’re seeing the faintest star and the dark-adapted eye on a very dark night out in the country, away from the cities, the faintest star you can see typically will have around 90 photons inside that wave hump. But a meditator can see all the way down to one photon.

This has been demonstrated in lab science. People practicing our technique of meditation are able with 98% accuracy to detect one photon of light in a dark-adapted mask setting. And so, perceptual acuity. Auditory acuity.

The olfactory acuity, the ability to detect a molecule of a fragrant substance, an aromatic, one molecule of it in an entire room of air. You can introduce one molecule of an aromatic substance, and a meditator can detect it and describe it. These are quantum, mechanical, perceptual abilities.

[16:37] The Ultimate in Sensory Perception, Seeing Yourself in Everything

And so, when we become meditators, besides the fact of it stripping away all the stresses and unleashing our mental potential, and giving us the health benefits that it gives us, it gives us hyperacute sensory perception.

With regular practice, a state of consciousness evolves from this hyperacute sensory perception in which we can detect the Unified Field itself in an object. We can detect the consciousness that we are, that you are, fundamental unmanifest consciousness at your own inner baseline. In eyes-open waking state, you can detect the You inside of an object.

The fundamental You. Not meaning the little individualistic you that was born somewhere and grew up and rode a bicycle and things. No, the big, vast, unbounded Universal You can be detected through your senses in every object.

So the relationship between consciousness and matter is infinite correlation. They are the same thing. The relationship between consciousness and matter is the relationship of one. They are the same thing.

There is nothing that is not consciousness, because there is nothing that is not Unified Field, and Unified Field is consciousness. So that’s the answer to that question. Let’s bring that to a close now.

Jai Guru Deva.