In an earlier, wiser age,
what today we call ‘Theories of Everything’ used to be called ‘religions’ or
‘philosophies’ and their proponents were pious thinkers or ‘philosophers’
rather than ‘physicists’. Simple philosophical reflection tells us that without
prior awareness of a universe of things, there can be no theory about anything
- let alone a theory of ‘everything’. It is only because we insist on regarding
awareness itself as a thing - or as an evolutionary ‘property’ only of
certain types of thing (biological organisms in particular) that we are blinded
to the truth of an age-old ‘Theory of Everything’ – namely that Awareness
itself IS everything. Not awareness OF some thing or other, nor simply human
subjective awareness - ‘my’ awareness or ‘yours’ - but Awareness as such,
capitalised.
The philosophy that
‘Awareness is Everything’ and its converse - namely that ‘Everything is
Awareness’ - is what I term ‘The Awareness Principle’. This Principle
challenges every search for a ‘Theory of Everything’ grounded purely in
physics, and aiming to find it in the form of some super-complex mathematical
relation, of matter, energy, space and time. For as the philosopher Martin
Heidegger noted, the nature and presuppositions of physics are not themselves
the possible object of any possible physical experiment but are something that
needs to be thought through meta-physically - philosophically. If we even begin
to think the nature of physics philosophically we see immediately that,
far from being evidentially, experimentally or ‘empirically’ grounded, it
ignores the most self-evident, ‘empirical’ starting point of scientific inquiry
– which is not the objective existence of a universe of
matter, energy space and time but subjective awareness of it.
I use the term ‘Awareness’
(capitalised) rather than “our awareness” deliberately - because The Awareness
Principle also challenges the presupposition that awareness is necessarily the private
property of separate bodies or beings. Instead it proposes that all
bodies and beings are but individualised shapes, patterns and qualities taken
by Awareness as such, that beings only perceive each other as ‘bodies’
in the first place within fields of awareness - and do so according to
the particular way their individual awareness fields are perceptually
and conceptually patterned. ‘Concepts’ themselves are not just ideas in our
heads and minds – detached from the universe they seek to represent. Instead
they are but the conceptual expression of highly individualised and
species-specific field-patterns of awareness – patterns that shape each
species’ and each individual’s entire perception of the universe, not
least our own scientific conceptions of it and theories ‘about’ it.
This brings us to a new and
revolutionary philosophical aspect of The Awareness Principle, namely the
understanding it brings that Awareness is not something localised in our heads
or in individual organs or organisms, but has an essentially non-local or field
character. Having the character of an unbounded spatial and temporal field,
Awareness is - in principle - irreducible to and unexplainable by any
thing or things we are aware of as (localised) phenomena within this
field, any localised objects and any localised ‘subjects’ of awareness too.
Thus to even seek to ‘explain’ awareness as the product of some localisable
thing we are aware of (the human brain for example) makes no more sense
than to see dreaming - the entire
field of our dreaming awareness - as something reducible to, caused or
explicable by some particular, localisable thing that we happen to dream of
within this field. Even if we happened to repeatedly dream an image of a brain,
who would even ‘dream’ of taking this as evidence that dreaming as
such is a property of this particular dreamt object? Yet this is the
essential error of materialistic body- and brain-based accounts of ‘mind’,
‘consciousness’ and awareness, forgetting as they do that the brain itself is
but one localisable phenomenon within the larger field of human waking
awareness - and that this field too is in principle irreducible to
any one Thing that appears within it.
The principle that awareness
has a field character, and therefore cannot in principle be reduced to or
explained by anything we are aware of within that field, is one of the basic
axioms or ‘first principles’ of ‘The Awareness Principle’. Its most essential ‘first principle’ is that Awareness as such -
and not any thing we perceive or conceive of within it, is itself necessarily
the ‘First Principle’ of the universe – being the precondition for our
awareness of anything and everything, and thus the precondition too for
any possible ‘Theory of Everything’. Understanding this, the only possible
‘Theory of Everything’ is The Awareness Principle itself - the understanding
that Awareness is Everything and Everything is Awareness. For just as there can
in principle be nothing ‘outside’
space, so can aso there be nothing outside Awareness - no ‘Thing’ to study or
invent ‘Theories’ about. The Awareness Principle simply recognises Awareness as
that which is in principle be the sole or absolute reality - leading to
a Theory which much necessarily understand all Things as manifestations or
materialisations of Awareness.
The Awareness Principle achieves this
understanding only by undermining a principal unquestioned presupposition of
both scientists and academic philosophers - namely that Awareness is
necessarily the property of separate, localised beings or bodies. Yet as long
as religionists too, cling onto the belief that ‘God’ is some sort of
being ‘with’ awareness, rather than being identical with Awareness (an
age-old Indian religious philosophy) they fall into the same trap as - and
therefore fall prey to - the atheistic arguments of scientists such as Richard
Dawkins or philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. For it is only because they also
cling to the misconception that Awareness is necessarily the private property
of beings in the form of biological organisms or organs – the brain in
particular - that they so firmly believe ‘God’ to be a mere figment of human
beings and of the evolutionary biology of their brains.
All current scientific
‘Theories of Everything’ are essentially the same Theory – the Theory that the
universe consists solely of ‘Things’. Within the terms of this unstated ‘Theory
of Everything’, and in contrast to The Awareness Principle, ‘Things’ themselves
are necessarily seen as preconditions for sentience, consciousness or
awareness, awareness is necessarily seen as a product or by-product of some
Thing, and effectively reduced to a ‘Thing’ in itself. It is in the light of
such a grand, dogmatic unstated and above all unquestioned ‘Theory of
Everything’ that we can truly heed the words of
Martin Heidegger: “Science IS the new religion.” For all would-be
physical-scientific ‘Theories of Everything’ amount to nothing more than a religiously
held belief that the universe consists of nothing more than ‘Things’ -
thus totally forgetting that Awareness of Things is prior in principle
to any possible Theory of them, and that therefore Awareness as such cannot in
principle be reduced to or explained by any ‘Thing’ whatsoever. Such “in
principle” recognitions express the essence of ‘The Awareness Principle’,
together with the consequent affirmation that The Awareness Principle itself
is the sole basis for a ‘Theory’ of that which ultimately lies behind
‘Everything’ - for it is the only Theory that recognises that any and every
‘Thing’ is essentially a phenomenon ‘emerging’ from and within fields of
awareness, and ultimately from within that unbounded and infinite field of
awareness which alone deserved to be recognised and religiously revered
as ‘God’ – and must be if God is not to
be reduced to one being among others we are aware of. Awareness as such itself is the not only the
source of what we call matter and energy, but is also the essence of what we
call ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, indeed the essence of God as such. All this is
anathema to a not only to all forms of religion whose ‘Theory of Everything’
reduce God to one being or phenomenon among others, but also to that science,
now elevated to the status of a religion, that has forgotten the very meaning
of its name - ‘physics’.
The term ‘physics’ derives
the Greek physis – means to ‘emerge’, just as the term ‘phenomenon’
comes from the Greek phainesthai – meaning ‘to show itself’, and the
word ‘existence’ has the root meaning of ‘to stand out’ or ‘ex-ist’. The Awareness Principle whilst indeed a philosophical
‘Theory of Everything’, is also one that at the same time understands all
Things as physical phenomena in the truest, most radical or ‘root’ sense
of these words - as things that can in principle only be seen to ‘emerge from’,
‘show themselves’ and ‘stand out’ (‘ex-ist’) within Awareness as such -
understood as the very context or field from and within which they do
so. ‘A’ for Awareness is truly the missing factor and letter in that most
famous Einsteinian equation: e = mc2. For not even such a thing as
‘light’, whose speed is a basic and invariable factor in this equation, would
be visible were it not for the invisible light of awareness in which
alone all things, including ‘physical’ light itself, can emerge, show
themselves and ex-ist or stand out. To explain such phenomena as light itself
in purely mathematical terms as abstract ‘quanta’ is not to bring science
closer to the underlying reality of the universe, but infinitely further away
from what is immediately evident to each and all of us - namely that we could
not be aware of anything, let alone develop a ‘Theory of Everything’ without
the simple experiential fact of us being first of all aware of a
universe of things. And just as no objects are perceptible or even conceivable
without a space surrounding them, nor is our awareness of anything or in
space conceivable without a spacious field of awareness. The recognition
that space and time themselves are not essentially ‘objective’ or ‘physical’
dimensions of the universe but innate dimensions of subjective awareness was
bequeathed to Western Philosophy centuries ago by Immanuel Kant - and much,
much earlier by Indian religious philosophy. When will our modern physicists,
with their would-be ‘Theories of Everything’ begin to heed this heritage,
instead of priding themselves on the ‘objectivity’ of their Theories and
denying the essentially subjective nature of all experiencing and of
‘Everything’ we can possibly experience?
In this respect, not only today’s scientists with their crude
conceptions of the universe, but also their current religionist enemies, with
their crude and unquestioned concepts of God, would both do well to be reminded
of such already clear affirmations of ‘The Awareness Principle’ as I cite
below. These affirmations stem neither from priests, physicists or purely
academic ‘philosophers of mind’ but from the most pious thinkers of 10th
century India, and give expression to truths already recognised by other sages
centuries before them:
“… the being of all things that are
recognised
in awareness in turn depends on
awareness.”
“… space is inherent in the soul as true subjectivity which is at
once empty of objects and which also provides a place in which objects may be
known.”
Abhinavagupta
“Every appearance owes its existence
to the light of awareness.
Nothing can have its own being
without the light of awareness.”
Kshemaraja
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