FEATURE
Advaita in Science
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science”.
Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954.
Science had changed fully as far back as 1925 with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. However, we never try and teach the real science in schools and colleges even to this day. There are reasons why we do that but, that is outside the purview of this write up. Heisenberg’s colleague, Hans Peter Durr, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, a very dear friend of mine, has gone a step further to show that matter and energy are but the two faces of the same coin. (E=M) We were lecturing together in San Diego recently where he was talking on matter and I on new science of man. I have drawn heavily for this piece from his talk there. I am indebted to him for these thoughts, although he feels (and I agree) that we have no right to own our thoughts as all thoughts are but energy. They could be received by a prepared mind at the right time. The recent fight for intellectual property rights, etc in science (and patenting) make no scientific sense. They do not even make ethical sense. If Edison were to patent his bulb we would still be in the dark or would have been paying through our noses for a single light bulb, thanks to the greed of the industry.
“We scientists know what is right and what is wrong. We do not make vague statements like the theologians and all the other cultures. We know for certain what is right and what is wrong. Now we have a great shock that we are also in the same boat as theologians and the rest; using metaphors and images to talk about it…..We have realized that there is no reality,” feels Hans Peter Durr. Durr calls the present state of scientific reality as advaita in Sanskrit but he says he is using a crude word a-duality in English. He went on to show that Indian sages of yore knew all this when they wrote about advaita.
“Bahiranthasya Bhootaanaam,
Charam acharamevacha; sookshymaavathet avijneyam,
Doorastham cha aniketaja; Tat.”
(It is inside of everything and outside also. It is so subtle that science of any kind can not see it. For those that do not know, it does not exist but otherwise it is inside us only. That!)
Coming from a German and the greatest living scientist today this gives me greater joy as people have been laughing at me when I used to write that we do not have any reality in medical science. We DO NOT HAVE any science of man! The last statement of mine is supported by another Nobel Laureate scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrel, in his celebrated book Man the unknown, wherein he states that we do not have any science of man. Instead, we use the inanimate science of physics and chemistry in an animate human being-a square plug in a round hole. No wonder that the recent audit in the USA showed the medical fraternity with all its claptrap as the leading cause of death and disability there followed by cancer and heart attacks in that order. Audits of five countries in the past, where doctors went on strike, showed that during the strike period death rates and disability went down significantly only to come back to the original levels when doctors returned to work. This provoked an editorial in the British Medical Journal at that time entitled “Doctors going on strike would improve society’s health.”
Werner Heisenberg, at a very young age, as a pianist, had the inkling that the world does not have any definite form and is not a reality, indeed. He was a genius. This was, of course, shown to be true by Hans Peter Durr in his advaita theory. The world is now known to be just a drama like Adi Shankara’s Maya. Hans uses the correct German word for the world that we live in which is Wirklichkeit. In English it means “acting” or “changing constantly”. That is Maya in science. The future does not exist now. Future is yet to be born. Predicting the future in any sphere is just unscientific and does not come true. This is very relevant to medicine where a huge industry has grown around predicting this unpredictable future of mankind called the “Screening Industry” wherein the hapless apparently healthy people are goaded to have regular check ups to assure a healthy future! This nets billions of dollars to the medical business. This in my opinion is a perfect crime. All our interventions in such situations shall come to grief sooner than later. We can, however, create our own future by loving one another and being sensible in what we do today. That applies to health as well. Sensible living with universal compassion is the clue to better health in the future. We are interdependent.
Global warming threat is another such future mis-predcitions. Warmth and cold go in circles. Even as recently as the 1970 we were predicting another ice age based on the earth temperature coming down by 0.5 degree centigrade in the US in 1972 and the winter getting prolonged by a month in Europe with sleet preventing any crop! In just thirty years we are into the global warming threat. Edward Laurenz, after getting to know how to predict the weather, soon enough realized that his predictions never go right in the short term, not to speak of the long term predictions. That awareness got him to escape with another hypothesis, called the “Butterfly Effect.” As Hans Peter rightly pointed out scientists now talk in vague terms of images and metaphors like every one else in society. Our dream of deterministic predictability and relativity has all but gone awry as fast as it came in.
Advaita, non-duality, or the science of the whole, is what remains for ever. Even if you take a bit from it, the bit becomes a whole and the whole remains a whole. That principal helped Late Professor Rustum Roy and his colleagues to extract atomic hydrogen from salt water to run any engine. When you extract atomic hydrogen from water using ordinary radio waves you are left with normal water (whole) and not nascent oxygen as happens when you get molecular hydrogen from water. “Poornam idam and poornam adaha. This is a whole and that is a whole.” One of the arguments put forward by scientists is that God does not exist as we can not see him. I would like to know which of those scientists has been able to see an electron or its further divisions into leptons and so on? Christina Rosetti, the American poetess had written:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you;
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
God can be felt when the need comes. God is but energy and has no form as there is nothing that has any definite form in the world. The energy could be converted into a form, just as you pull the string of a violin to produce a wave like form-Gestalt in German. Imagine you calling your friend in New York in your cell phone. The electromagnetic energy from your cell phone alters the vacuum around (not ether as was thought) to get a wave form (gestalt) which can be recognized by your friend’s cell phone at the other end immediately! Your internet works on the same principle.
Our Sun and the other stars around it are but a small little speck in the whole cosmos where there are millions of other collections like this. Science knew about the atom and the leptons for some time now but did not have a clue as to where the original last bit (lepton) initially came from! This wisdom also came from Indian rishis. In search of such wisdom three young physics teachers from Cambridge University came to India. They were Edwin Babington, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. They spent time in the Himalayas. Having become yogic siddhis, they then used to meditate deeply. On one such occasion they visualized the inner core of matter (as it was known then) and could see (through an imaginary third eye which resembled an eye piece of the microscope) the atomic structure of nine elements from hydrogen through helium. In retrospect their descriptions fit the bill better than all the complicated atomic structures depicted by Neils Bohr and his colleagues.
Annie Besant stayed on to become the Indian National Congress (not today’s congress) President and the rest is history which all the readers know. In their book Occult Chemistry, written in 1920 (Oxford University Press, Madras) Besant et. al. described the last bit of an atom getting its material (or energy as it is known now) from an ethereal world like smoke coming through the key hole- a perfect fit for the superstring theory of conventional physics of today. Many conventional scientists would have pooh-poohed their ideas then. The book is now republished with many great physicists as contributors with the same name but with lots more stuff. This fact, seen in the context of the new theory of Hans Peter Durr, the hypothesis of Babington et. al makes good sense for science of the future. Science and all other branches of knowledge are but different routes to the truth. As such there should be no conflict between spirituality and science. They could complement one another in a judicious mixture for the common good of mankind.
“We believe the modern medical model has become increasingly reductionist: human beings are seen as repositories of malfunctioning organs that need repair. This view results in an onslaught of tests and uncertainty. Doctors often take refuge behind technology because it is easier and less time-consuming than talking with a complex human being who is their patient.” [The New Yorker 5/17/99].This was the opinion of a Nobel Laureate medical scientist and my former teacher at Harvard, Bernard Lown and his colleague Thomas Graboys. Any one who has read many of my publications would know by now that this sentiment was expressed by me many times in the past. Human body works as a whole and is not matter but a bundle of energy (a bundle of jumping lepto-quarks). Each DNA inside human cells emits a photon light (bio-photons) as described by Fritz-Albert Popp, a great contemporary physicist. He has shown elegantly that each cell in the human body is in synch with every other cell as also the cells of others in the vicinity. When this is lost illnesses result.
We therefore need a new science of man where we look at the whole human being as one entity and not his/her organs in isolation. Organ based specialties are our bane. Diagnosis is another new disease and we have to move fast enough out of this obsession with disease and move to real world of wellness and illness. To complete this piece there is a nice quote from a leading American professor of medicine, Mary Tinnetti at Yale who says. “The time has come to abandon disease as the focus of medical care. The changed spectrum of health, the complex interplay of biological and non-biological factors, the aging population, and the interindividual variability in health priorities render medical care that is centered on the diagnosis and treatment of individual diseases at best out of date and at worst harmful. A primary focus on disease may inadvertently lead to under treatment, overtreatment, or mistreatment. Clinical decision making for all patients should be predicated on the attainment of individual goals and the identification and treatment of all modifiable biological and nonbiological factors, rather than solely on the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of individual diseases.”
Could we now collectively think of changing the sciences for the better? Earlier we do that the better for future generations. Science is change; what does not change does not qualify to be science. So, let us move on………. till we are proved wrong! “Between February 24th and 27th in the National Academies Building at 21-C Streets in Washington, D.C., a much more significant, than Neil Armstrong’s giant step, occurred for the whole world. What this conference achieved, for the future of every citizen’s health, was to destroy the dismissive attitude of the establishment, profession and its captive press towards the whole field of prevention and wellness approaches to health. No more can terms such as “wu-wu stuff”, “unscientific”, “and not evidenced-based” be used as weapons. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) with great credit to its leadership, as part of the U.S.’s National Academies, has opened a new gateway to Integrative health. At the very end of the conference, Late Professor Rustum Roy, a founding father of IOM presented his own term (tested and approved by many national leaders) for what the entire meeting was all about— he has been calling it : “Whole Person Healing” of Body, Mind & Spirit, healed via the body, the mind, and/or the spirit, which was accepted. Prof Roy called it as One Giant Step for America’s Health. (Slightly modified by the author to shorten the narrative.)
“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
William Lawrence Bragg
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science”.
Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954.
Science had changed fully as far back as 1925 with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. However, we never try and teach the real science in schools and colleges even to this day. There are reasons why we do that but, that is outside the purview of this write up. Heisenberg’s colleague, Hans Peter Durr, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, a very dear friend of mine, has gone a step further to show that matter and energy are but the two faces of the same coin. (E=M) We were lecturing together in San Diego recently where he was talking on matter and I on new science of man. I have drawn heavily for this piece from his talk there. I am indebted to him for these thoughts, although he feels (and I agree) that we have no right to own our thoughts as all thoughts are but energy. They could be received by a prepared mind at the right time. The recent fight for intellectual property rights, etc in science (and patenting) make no scientific sense. They do not even make ethical sense. If Edison were to patent his bulb we would still be in the dark or would have been paying through our noses for a single light bulb, thanks to the greed of the industry.
“We scientists know what is right and what is wrong. We do not make vague statements like the theologians and all the other cultures. We know for certain what is right and what is wrong. Now we have a great shock that we are also in the same boat as theologians and the rest; using metaphors and images to talk about it…..We have realized that there is no reality,” feels Hans Peter Durr. Durr calls the present state of scientific reality as advaita in Sanskrit but he says he is using a crude word a-duality in English. He went on to show that Indian sages of yore knew all this when they wrote about advaita.
“Bahiranthasya Bhootaanaam,
Charam acharamevacha; sookshymaavathet avijneyam,
Doorastham cha aniketaja; Tat.”
(It is inside of everything and outside also. It is so subtle that science of any kind can not see it. For those that do not know, it does not exist but otherwise it is inside us only. That!)
Coming from a German and the greatest living scientist today this gives me greater joy as people have been laughing at me when I used to write that we do not have any reality in medical science. We DO NOT HAVE any science of man! The last statement of mine is supported by another Nobel Laureate scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrel, in his celebrated book Man the unknown, wherein he states that we do not have any science of man. Instead, we use the inanimate science of physics and chemistry in an animate human being-a square plug in a round hole. No wonder that the recent audit in the USA showed the medical fraternity with all its claptrap as the leading cause of death and disability there followed by cancer and heart attacks in that order. Audits of five countries in the past, where doctors went on strike, showed that during the strike period death rates and disability went down significantly only to come back to the original levels when doctors returned to work. This provoked an editorial in the British Medical Journal at that time entitled “Doctors going on strike would improve society’s health.”
Werner Heisenberg, at a very young age, as a pianist, had the inkling that the world does not have any definite form and is not a reality, indeed. He was a genius. This was, of course, shown to be true by Hans Peter Durr in his advaita theory. The world is now known to be just a drama like Adi Shankara’s Maya. Hans uses the correct German word for the world that we live in which is Wirklichkeit. In English it means “acting” or “changing constantly”. That is Maya in science. The future does not exist now. Future is yet to be born. Predicting the future in any sphere is just unscientific and does not come true. This is very relevant to medicine where a huge industry has grown around predicting this unpredictable future of mankind called the “Screening Industry” wherein the hapless apparently healthy people are goaded to have regular check ups to assure a healthy future! This nets billions of dollars to the medical business. This in my opinion is a perfect crime. All our interventions in such situations shall come to grief sooner than later. We can, however, create our own future by loving one another and being sensible in what we do today. That applies to health as well. Sensible living with universal compassion is the clue to better health in the future. We are interdependent.
Global warming threat is another such future mis-predcitions. Warmth and cold go in circles. Even as recently as the 1970 we were predicting another ice age based on the earth temperature coming down by 0.5 degree centigrade in the US in 1972 and the winter getting prolonged by a month in Europe with sleet preventing any crop! In just thirty years we are into the global warming threat. Edward Laurenz, after getting to know how to predict the weather, soon enough realized that his predictions never go right in the short term, not to speak of the long term predictions. That awareness got him to escape with another hypothesis, called the “Butterfly Effect.” As Hans Peter rightly pointed out scientists now talk in vague terms of images and metaphors like every one else in society. Our dream of deterministic predictability and relativity has all but gone awry as fast as it came in.
Advaita, non-duality, or the science of the whole, is what remains for ever. Even if you take a bit from it, the bit becomes a whole and the whole remains a whole. That principal helped Late Professor Rustum Roy and his colleagues to extract atomic hydrogen from salt water to run any engine. When you extract atomic hydrogen from water using ordinary radio waves you are left with normal water (whole) and not nascent oxygen as happens when you get molecular hydrogen from water. “Poornam idam and poornam adaha. This is a whole and that is a whole.” One of the arguments put forward by scientists is that God does not exist as we can not see him. I would like to know which of those scientists has been able to see an electron or its further divisions into leptons and so on? Christina Rosetti, the American poetess had written:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you;
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
God can be felt when the need comes. God is but energy and has no form as there is nothing that has any definite form in the world. The energy could be converted into a form, just as you pull the string of a violin to produce a wave like form-Gestalt in German. Imagine you calling your friend in New York in your cell phone. The electromagnetic energy from your cell phone alters the vacuum around (not ether as was thought) to get a wave form (gestalt) which can be recognized by your friend’s cell phone at the other end immediately! Your internet works on the same principle.
Our Sun and the other stars around it are but a small little speck in the whole cosmos where there are millions of other collections like this. Science knew about the atom and the leptons for some time now but did not have a clue as to where the original last bit (lepton) initially came from! This wisdom also came from Indian rishis. In search of such wisdom three young physics teachers from Cambridge University came to India. They were Edwin Babington, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. They spent time in the Himalayas. Having become yogic siddhis, they then used to meditate deeply. On one such occasion they visualized the inner core of matter (as it was known then) and could see (through an imaginary third eye which resembled an eye piece of the microscope) the atomic structure of nine elements from hydrogen through helium. In retrospect their descriptions fit the bill better than all the complicated atomic structures depicted by Neils Bohr and his colleagues.
Annie Besant stayed on to become the Indian National Congress (not today’s congress) President and the rest is history which all the readers know. In their book Occult Chemistry, written in 1920 (Oxford University Press, Madras) Besant et. al. described the last bit of an atom getting its material (or energy as it is known now) from an ethereal world like smoke coming through the key hole- a perfect fit for the superstring theory of conventional physics of today. Many conventional scientists would have pooh-poohed their ideas then. The book is now republished with many great physicists as contributors with the same name but with lots more stuff. This fact, seen in the context of the new theory of Hans Peter Durr, the hypothesis of Babington et. al makes good sense for science of the future. Science and all other branches of knowledge are but different routes to the truth. As such there should be no conflict between spirituality and science. They could complement one another in a judicious mixture for the common good of mankind.
“We believe the modern medical model has become increasingly reductionist: human beings are seen as repositories of malfunctioning organs that need repair. This view results in an onslaught of tests and uncertainty. Doctors often take refuge behind technology because it is easier and less time-consuming than talking with a complex human being who is their patient.” [The New Yorker 5/17/99].This was the opinion of a Nobel Laureate medical scientist and my former teacher at Harvard, Bernard Lown and his colleague Thomas Graboys. Any one who has read many of my publications would know by now that this sentiment was expressed by me many times in the past. Human body works as a whole and is not matter but a bundle of energy (a bundle of jumping lepto-quarks). Each DNA inside human cells emits a photon light (bio-photons) as described by Fritz-Albert Popp, a great contemporary physicist. He has shown elegantly that each cell in the human body is in synch with every other cell as also the cells of others in the vicinity. When this is lost illnesses result.
We therefore need a new science of man where we look at the whole human being as one entity and not his/her organs in isolation. Organ based specialties are our bane. Diagnosis is another new disease and we have to move fast enough out of this obsession with disease and move to real world of wellness and illness. To complete this piece there is a nice quote from a leading American professor of medicine, Mary Tinnetti at Yale who says. “The time has come to abandon disease as the focus of medical care. The changed spectrum of health, the complex interplay of biological and non-biological factors, the aging population, and the interindividual variability in health priorities render medical care that is centered on the diagnosis and treatment of individual diseases at best out of date and at worst harmful. A primary focus on disease may inadvertently lead to under treatment, overtreatment, or mistreatment. Clinical decision making for all patients should be predicated on the attainment of individual goals and the identification and treatment of all modifiable biological and nonbiological factors, rather than solely on the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of individual diseases.”
Could we now collectively think of changing the sciences for the better? Earlier we do that the better for future generations. Science is change; what does not change does not qualify to be science. So, let us move on………. till we are proved wrong! “Between February 24th and 27th in the National Academies Building at 21-C Streets in Washington, D.C., a much more significant, than Neil Armstrong’s giant step, occurred for the whole world. What this conference achieved, for the future of every citizen’s health, was to destroy the dismissive attitude of the establishment, profession and its captive press towards the whole field of prevention and wellness approaches to health. No more can terms such as “wu-wu stuff”, “unscientific”, “and not evidenced-based” be used as weapons. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) with great credit to its leadership, as part of the U.S.’s National Academies, has opened a new gateway to Integrative health. At the very end of the conference, Late Professor Rustum Roy, a founding father of IOM presented his own term (tested and approved by many national leaders) for what the entire meeting was all about— he has been calling it : “Whole Person Healing” of Body, Mind & Spirit, healed via the body, the mind, and/or the spirit, which was accepted. Prof Roy called it as One Giant Step for America’s Health. (Slightly modified by the author to shorten the narrative.)
“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
William Lawrence Bragg
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