Universal Consciousness
What does it mean to be one with the ‘Universal Consciousness?’
In my last few articles in the Yoga series, I talked about the ‘Universal Consciousness.’
While Demystifying Yoga- Part 4 explains what Universal Consciousness is, what does it mean to be one with the universal consciousness??
What would it feel like to finally attain nirvana or spiritual awakening??
As humans, we are so used to an objective reality or an objective goal that it gets difficult to move towards a subjective goal where we can’t define or visualize what the outcome looks like. But how can anyone explain or visualize something that is beyond human imagination? While science (or I should say, pockets in science) today believe in ‘Wholeness’ or a ‘Deeper underlying Reality,’ there is still no objective definition for this ‘Deeper Reality.’
Max Planck said, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature (consciousness), for, in the final analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.”
Let’s see how Vedanta explains this ‘Universal Consciousness,’ which, as per me, is the best explanation or the closest understanding we can get of this state. Every human being passes through the ‘waking,’ ‘dreaming,’ and the ‘deep- sleep’ states. Vedanta defines a fourth state, the state of ‘Universal Consciousness,’ called ‘Turiya.’ Let me explain this fourth unknown state by walking you through the three known states and based on the known, let’s theorize the unknown.
Do you remember any of your dreams vividly, a dream where you lived a lifetime, or maybe a nightmare that left a deep imprint on your conscious memory?
We sometimes live a lifetime in a dream, feeling the emotions, the pain, and the pleasure of the dreamer and believing the dream to be a reality’. It is only when we wake up that we realize that it was all a dream! We come out of our dream when we naturally transition to the ‘waking’ state or when the dream is so jarring to our emotions that we are thrown out of our sleep (everyone will remember a nightmare which wakes us up rudely but gives us a sense of immense relief that it was not real). As a ‘deep-sleeper,’ we experience deep, relaxed sleep and are in touch with our subconscious mind, but it is not an experience that the conscious mind registers or remembers.
I recently watched the movie Inception once again; what a brilliant portrayal of spiraling dreams as the plot moves across the three (four) levels of dream- state or levels of subconscious minds of the actors.
Now for a moment, imagine that your current state of wakefulness is just another state or another level of dream. When the right trigger comes your way, you will wake up to a completely different level, the fourth level where you realize that this entire life that you were living was just another dream. You might have lived a lifetime as a ‘waker,’ but now in this fourth state, you realize that this was just a blink in your lifetime in ‘Turiya.’ Just like a bad dream can jolt you back into the ‘waking’ state, an extreme life experience, excessive pain or hurt can suddenly take you into the state of ‘Turiya’ or when you finally die and leave your gross body, you move naturally into this fourth state of ‘Universal consciousness.’
Given this narrative, we can intellectualize what ‘Universal consciousness’ means, but can we now describe what it feels to be in this fourth state?? Can a dreamer explain what it is to be when awake?? Can a dreamer even fathom the state of ‘Wakefulness’ in the dream state?? We can meditate and touch our subconscious, which is an expression of the ‘Universal consciousness,’ but that will still not give us an experiential understanding of what this fourth state entails.
You can’t solve the problem with the same consciousness that created it… Einstein
Demystifying Yoga- Part 5 explains the connection between this ‘Universal consciousness’ and Quantum physics. Quantum physics, however, does not still have answers to a lot of questions like quantum entanglement, where entangled particles show a simultaneous change in state, no matter what the distance is between them. This violates Einstein’s theory of relativity, and our picture of reality would completely collapse if this were the case.
In my next article, I will talk about an alternate interpretation of Quantum physics, which was expounded by David Bohm, an American-born British quantum physicist who was a leading expert in theoretical physics, neuropsychology, and philosophy. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential theoretical physicists of the 20th century. Bohm believed that there was a deeper reality beneath the quantum level, a ‘Wholeness’ which connects the entire micro and the macrocosm.
“The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”
― David Bohm, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory
