Upanishads
and the Universe
By
Hiranmay Karlekar
August 22 2003
In his absorbing book Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations-with
Remarkable People, Fritzof Capra, talks of an after-dinner conversation in
Berkeley, the United States, among him, his wife Jacqueline, the designer of the
Bell helicopter, Arthur Young, his wife, Ruth, the head of the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratories and an outstanding physicist, Dr Geoffrey Chew, his wife Denyse.
The subject was the notion of certainty in science. As Chew showed that the
successive examples of scientific facts presented by Young were really
approximate notions, Young cried out in frustration, "Look, here are
absolute facts. There are six people sitting around this table right now and
this is absolutely true." Chew said, smiling gently at Denyse, who was
pregnant then, "I don't know Arthur. Who can tell precisely where one
person begins and the other ends?"
Wrote the English poet, John Donne, "No man is an
island, entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main./ Any man's death diminishes me because / I am involved in mankind; and
therefore/ Never send to know for whom the/ bell tolls; it tolls for
thee."
Geoffrey Chew, and John Donne spoke of interconnectedness of
human beings. The Upanishad's propounded the concept of an inter-connected world
as a part of an inter-connected cosmos. The common presence of the Brahman or
the Universal Consciousness linked all things, animate and inanimate. It created
and put itself into everything which, as a result, was its manifestation and,
therefore, sacred and had to be treated according to the principles of
Dharma.
Says the Isha Upanishad, "He who sees all beings in the
self, and the / self in all beings, hates none/ To the illumined soul, the self
is all./
"For he who sees everywhere oneness, how/ Can there be
delusion or grief?" (Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick
Manchester).
The Brahman, unborn and deathless, invisible, without colour
and formless, one and without a second, was present in human beings as the Atman
or the individual self, whose attributes were identical to those of the Brahman.
More, the essence of the Atman and all other things was the same. Thus in the
Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddaloka Aruni asks his son, Svetaketu Aruneya, to
bring the fruit of a banyan (nyayagrodha) tree. He then makes him get the seeds
out by breaking the fruit, and break the seeds into invisible parts, and
says,
"Good lad, on this subtle part-the/ subtle part you do
not see-rests the great banyan tree. Good lad, have faith.
"This subtle part is what all this has as self. It is
the truth; it is the self. You are that Svetaketu." (Translated by Valeric
J Roebuck).
Earlier, Uddaloka Aruni had talked of "this great
tree" pervaded "by the life, by the self" that stood "happy,
ever drinking", and added, "When separated from the life, it dies, but
the life does not die. This subtle part is what all this has as self. It is
truth. It is the self."(Roebuck).
If the self, that is life, identical with the Brahman of
which it is a part, is consciousness, are these subtle parts repositories of
consciousness? Is consciousness life? Is life the common presence in cosmos? If
so, where do inanimate objects, obviously a part of the cosmos, fit? Is life
inherent in matter? The Upanishadic concept of the all-pervasiveness and nature
of Brahman was intuitive. The sages whose wisdom the Upanishad's embody, had
neither the accumulated corpus of knowledge nor the analytical tools and
equipment for observation and experimentation that scientists the 18th century
onwards had at their disposal. The question arises: To what extent is their
intuitive vision borne out by modern science, which originated in the West in
the post-Renaissance period?
The seventeenth century saw the demolition of the concept of
a living universe, that was based on the application of Aristotelian system of
logic to Christian theology, within an epistemic framework that has historically
come to be known as the scholastic, and that had subordinated the temporal to
the spiritual, reason to faith. What took its place was the Newtonian idea of a
mechanistic, law-governed universe that functioned eternally according to its
own gravitation-based dynamics and had nothing to do with any kind of divine or
spiritual entity. So great was the prestige of Isaac Newton, whose landmark
discoveries of the working of nature led to its emergence, and so much in
harmony with it was with the post-Renaissance humanist Weltanschauung with its
emphasis on the supremacy of reason and relegation of the spiritual and
religious, that it influenced thinking in almost every sphere of knowledge, the
most striking example being the Marxian emphasis on the inexorable laws of a
dialectically unfolding history.
It took its first major knock when the second law of
thermodynamics, enunciated in the 19th century by Rudolph Clausius and Lord
Kelvin, stated that there was an inexorable loss of thermal energy in the
universe as disorders measured in terms of entropy had a natural tendency to
increase in closed systems. There was, therefore, an inexorable, movement
towards "death" from loss of heat. Another knock came in 1897 when
Joseph John Thompson discovered a fundamental particle smaller than the atom,
called it the electron, and inaugurated the chapter of particle physics. Niels
Bohr's theory of Complimentarity showed that a phenomenon could be viewed in two
mutually exclusive ways, both valid in their own terms. Max Planck showed that
like matter, energy existed in particles or packets or quanta, and Louis de
Broglie that sub-atomic particles-even atoms-could sometimes behave as waves.
Erwin Schroedinger mathematically proved the existence of De Broglie's waves and
that electrons were a kind of matter waves-and Max Born that what Schroedinger
showed was not an electron but its statistically possible location because some
electrons could go through a barrier, some could not. And then Werner
Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle showed that the exact position and the
precise location of an electron could not be simultaneously determined, nor
could one be certain where an electron would go if hit. Albert Einstein
doubtless rejected the Uncertainty Principle but his Theory of Relativity viewed
space and time as a continuum and implied that the universe looked different
from different places.
Whatever the differences among the scientists, the tumultuous
developments of 1920s shook the foundations of Newtonian physics, which believed
that all physical phenomena could be reduced to solid material particles. The
solid particles are now seen to turn, at the sub-atomic level, into wave-like
patterns of probabilities of inter-connections among parts of a unified whole.
If this leads one back to the Upanishadic concept of an interlinked universe, a
new dimension has been added to the discourse by Ilya Prigogine, the well known
physicist and Islabelle Stengers, a chemist, philosopher and historian of
science, who show, in their book Order out of Chaos that while some parts of the
universe may operate as separate, closed systems of the Newtonian type, most
parts-particularly biological and social systems-function as open ones
exchanging energy and matter with their environment. Besides, all systems have
subsystems which are constantly fluctuating and sometimes reach a
"bifurcation point" when they disintegrate into "chaos" or
reorganise themselves into new, higher levels of order, and it is impossible to
predict which course it will take.
Prigogine and Stenger's efforts to include social and
biological systems into the study of the universe indicates that the latter is a
living whole which cannot be understood in terms of physics alone, that
scientists are a part of the phenomenon they observe. This is in keeping with
the holistic approach which has gained an irreversible momentum with the coming
of age of the life and environmental sciences which posit a living, interlinked
and interdependent world where life is latent in all matter. We are again back
to the Upanishads according to which life of the atman pervades everything.
|