Apr 5, 2024, THE RAMAKRISHNA MISSION INSTITUTE OF CULTURE, GOLPARK
Achintya Kumar Tapadar and Pranabesh Chakraborty Memorial Lecture
Speaker: Sudipto Das
Venue: Shivananda Hall
***
The topic of our discussion is “Advaita Vedanta, Science, and Jagadish Chandra Bose.” All three elements—Advaita Vedanta, Science, and Jagadish Chandra Bose—are profound, perhaps too profound for someone like me not only to talk about in one evening but also to connect them all with a common thread and create a garland. I will attempt it with my limited knowledge and understanding, often over-simplifying a complicated concept and resorting to an older or classical version rather than the more accurate modern one.
For example, we will still use “ether” to explain radio waves, whereas Einstein pronounced more than 120 years ago that there’s nothing called ether. Sticking to “ether” simplifies our lives to a great extent and helps us understand many concepts and theories easily, even without knowing their technical nitty gritty. All we need is to somewhat understand the “operational principles” of a certain phenomenon based on a certain amount of “imagination.”
Say, we conceptualise ether as a sea of invisible fine matter, finer than water. Then, we consider the radio signal as waves in the sea of ether, very much like the waves in the other sea. That’s the source of the term “ঈথার তরঙ্গ” or “ether waves” in Bengali. Now, the waves can be created only by a disturbance or vibration somewhere. Someone should have thrown a stone into a placid pond and set the water into vibration. If that’s true, it is not too difficult to visualise that an electric charge, immersed in ether, has suddenly been set into vibration and that this vibration then propagates through the sea as “ether waves.”
This is a very simplistic explanation of the creation and propagation of radio or electromagnetic waves without going into most of the technicalities. This explanation derives from certain “principles” we believe are at play: waves need a medium to propagate, waves are created by a disturbance, etc. We can take these “principles” as the Truth, Satyam, or, more simplistically, our “consciousness” about the Truth. But whether the Truth is “Absolute Right,” Ritam, and will stand the test of time is still not known. The Truth becomes the Absolute Right, Satyam Ritam Vrihat, only when the consciousness is at its highest level. Then, I myself become the TRUTH: I AM THAT Satyam Ritam Vrihat.
Let’s take an example. Millions of people would have seen an apple falling from a tree. But it only took Newton’s level of consciousness to see the truth about gravitation. But then, he believed that gravitation is an “Action at a Distance.” This means that whenever a new star pops up anywhere in the universe, we feel its gravitational pull instantaneously at any distance. But Einstein, with his level of consciousness, realised that this “Action at a Distance” is not the Absolute Right, Ritam. He pronounced that when a new star is born anywhere in the universe, its gravitation propagates through space at the speed of light, very much like an electromagnetic wave, and is felt on Earth not instantaneously but at a later point when the gravitational waves reach Earth.
How did Einstein realise this Satyam Ritam Vrihat? He never did any calculations or experiments to discover this. Then, how did he “imagine” the gravitational waves a hundred years before they were first observed in September 2015? It is as though the absolute truth just became manifest to him all by itself, or he just “heard” it. When “inspiration” attains Einstein’s level, “truth” doesn’t reveal through any action, like “vision,” drishti, or experiment: it manifests through “hearing,” shruti. It is as though he Himself was That Absolute Truth, and, hence, he knew.
With this, we have set the premise of today’s discussion and introduced some of the terms that we will refer to again and again: imagination, Inspiration, Consciousness, chit; truth and the Absolute Right, Satyam Ritam Vrihat; I AM THAT, Soham.
Our basic thought process this evening would be that there’s always a simple explanation for everything and that we complicate things because, as Tagore said humorously, we are unable to say simple things in a simple way. সহজ কথায় লিখতে আমায় কহ যে, সহজ কথা যায় না লেখা সহজে। In pursuit of simplicity, we will go back to the beginning, the genesis. A human is simplest at the beginning when she is a child. Folk music is among the simplest forms of music because that was the first music created by humans. In Bengali, we call it লোক সংগীত, the music of the people.
So, for Advaita Vedanta, too, we will go back to the beginning, when the concept was first introduced to us in the Rig Veda. Sri Aurobindo felt that the Vedas were “insufficiently equipped with intellectual and philosophical terms.” That’s a boon than a bane. Things are simple. You don’t need to break your head with the wordy term Madakranta to appreciate the meter of the Meghadutam. You don’t care if the Jana-Gana-Mana was written in a variation of dactylic-septameter.
The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, is the oldest surviving book created by humans, dating back to 1900 – 1500 BC. It’s close to 4000 years old. It’s also the oldest book of poetry and songs. Being the oldest literary work from a member of the Indo-European language family, where the ancient languages like Sanskrit, Farsi, Greek and Latin are siblings and cousins, the Rig Veda is a treasure trove to historians, linguists, linguistic palaeontologists, theologists, musicologists, poetry lovers, and many more. It’s unfortunate that the apotheosis of the book has made it alien to most Indians. Calling it God’s words, merely heard by humans, we have made sure that no one dares to touch them. Today, we will touch the Rig Veda.
We will also refer to the Atharva Veda, composed between 1200 and 1000 BC. It is 3000 years old and contemporaneous with the Zoroastrian Gatha from neighbouring Persia.
Among the modern writers, we will refer to Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, and Tagore. Among the scientists, we will, of course, talk about Jagadish Chandra Bose, the man of the evening, and a few others like Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Lord Kelvin. We will also talk a little bit about Comparative Linguistics, Quantum Physics, and Neuroscience.
***
Now, let’s directly get into Advaita Vedanta. First, let’s try to define it. As in science, everything starts with a definition. An example of a good definition is Newton’s third law of motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s simple, precise, devoid of any garnishing or ornamentation, and it calls out every aspect of the law.
The simplest definition of Advaita Vedanta, to me, is a popular Rabindra Sangeet: We are All the King in Our This King’s Kingdom – How else should We Unite with Our King?
আমরা সবাই রাজা আমাদের এই রাজার রাজত্বে – নইলে মোদের রাজার সনে মিলব কী স্বত্বে?
What derives from the song is this: We do have a king, and the king does have his kingdom. But every one of us is that king, too. And only with that consciousness should we and the king all merge into That One. Finally, it’s only That One that exists, and we call it by different names: एकं सत् विप्रा बहुधा वदन्ति.
It’s incredible that Tagore has classified this as a patriotic song. Likewise, many other songs about That One, Tat Ekam, have a patriotic fervour. The “Jaya He” of our national anthem is also for That One, that which governs the mind of all and is the creator of happiness for all. In Advaita Vedanta, the country is not separated from the self and That One.
If this is the Absolute Truth, Satyam Ritam Vrihat, that only That One exists, and that we call it by different names, then what prevents us from seeing it? Is it a lower level of Consciousness, चित्, or Illusion, माया?
Again, let’s resort to a simple definition of Maya before we proceed any further. Now we will resort to another poet, Kabir: The diamond was lying in the market, covered with ashes. So many ignorant people, murakh, passed by me (the diamond), but only the examining or discerning one, parkhi, took me up.
हीरा पड़ा बाजार में, रहा छार लपटाय | कितेही मूरख पाछे मोहे, कोई परखी लिया उठाय ||
The term murakh refers to someone without consciousness or intelligence, and parkhi, deriving from the root iksh, to look, is the one who can discriminate between right and wrong, between truth—the diamond—and falsehood—the ashes. Parkhi is the discerning and conscious one only to whom the Satyam and Ritam manifest, as the gravitational waves did only to Einstein.
Einstein “saw” something that no one else could see. In the context of “seeing,” it’s relevant to note that Newton had once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Here, “seeing” is nothing but being conscious and discerning the Ritam. And, “standing on the shoulders of Giants” could very well refer to increasing the consciousness from the collective learning of others. Einstein, coming a few centuries later than Newton, benefitted from the Giants earlier than him.
One of Tagore’s poems comes to mind: I walked for miles for many days, I spent much money and visited many lands, to see the mountains, to see the oceans. But I forgot to take the two steps from my home and behold with my wide-open eyes, the drop of dew swinging from an ear of paddy.
“Wide-open eyes” are the most important sensory organs connected to consciousness – we will come to that later.
Now that we have defined Advaita Vedanta and that which keeps us from knowing That One, Tat Ekam, let’s go back to the Rig Veda and study the 46th verse of the 164th hymn of its 1st book that introduces the concept. The verse says:
Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni they call – Him, the divine noble-winged Garut-man.
One exists; the wise call him variously. Agni, Yama, Matari-shvan they call.
Agni, Indra, and Mitra-Varuna, we will discuss later, are the levels of consciousness.
Divya suparna Garut-man, the divine noble-winged Garut-man, is the epithet of the mythical bird Garuda. The word garut derives from the root गॄ, gri, to swallow, which is related to the Indian gala, गल, গলা, etc., and English gullet, all meaning throat, and Greek glossa, meaning tongue. Accordingly, Garuda’s visualisation in the mythology is that of swallowing the fire of the sun’s rays or, perhaps, symbolically, carrying the sunlight on its wings. Connecting it to Akasha, which roughly corresponds to the now-debunked ether, the superfine matter that fills all the empty space of the universe, Garut-man is identical to the ether, whose waves were believed to be the carriers of light and any electromagnetic radiation.
Matari of matari-shvan means “in the ether,” and shvan derives from the root श्वि, shvi, to breathe, thrive; to swell, grow; and is related to the Indian shwas, श्वास, শ্বাস, meaning breath, Latin cumulus and English accumulation, and Greek kineo, meaning movement (the “k” and “sh” sounds are connected by the Law of Palatalisation of phonetic evolution). So matari-shvan is that which breathes or moves in the ether. It can’t be anything but the light or energy, the Prana of Indian metaphysics, which propagates through ether waves.
If these conjectures are correct, then it’s indeed incredible that the Rig Vedic seers did have a somewhat realistic idea of the light waves and their propagation through the etheric space. They derived at the idea not through scientific analysis, but by their understanding of the possible “operational principles” of the propagation of light.
So, if Agni, Indra, and Mitra-Varuna all refer to consciousness, Garut-man is akasha the matter, and Matari-shvan prana the energy, then the verse simply alludes to the idea that the One that exists and that which is called variously is nothing but consciousness, matter, and energy. That matter and energy are inter-convertible is well known now, thanks to Einstein’s famous E = MC squared equation. Consciousness, we will see, is also related to energy. So, we are now quite close to realising how everything in the universe resolves back into That One, Tat Ekam. That’s what is the crux of Advaita Vedanta.
***
Before we dive deeper into Advaita Vedanta, let’s throw a glance at what our scientists and philosophers felt about matter and energy, Akasha and Prana.
First, let’s consider this verse from the Atharva Veda from the Prana Hymn.
The word Prana derives from the root अन्, an, to live, breathe, move, etc., and is related to the English animate; Latin animus, meaning mind, consciousness; and Greek anemos, meaning wind, in the sense that it moves and also supports breathing. So, across languages, life, breathing, moving, mind, and consciousness are connected through the same root. Then, conversely, anything that doesn’t move and breathe is inanimate and should be non-life, devoid of mind and consciousness. But the verse says Prana rules over all that moves and breathes and that doesn’t, यद् च प्राणति यद् च न.
Does it imply that all that doesn’t seem to move is also governed or ruled by movements? Does it allude to the movements in the quantum realm at the sub-atomic level? Is, then, life still an exclusive vital agent associated only with living beings? Do non-living things, too, have life? “What is life” has bothered many, including the Nobel Laureate physicist Schrodinger, who wrote an eponymous book on the topic, quoting from the Upanishads at a few places.
Jagadish Chandra Bose, our man of the evening, almost paraphrased the Prana Hymn at the end of a lecture at the Royal Institution, London, in 1901. “Some property of matter,” he said, referring to electric response, “[is] common and persistent… Responsive processes seen in life have been fore-shadowed in non-life… There is no abrupt break, but a continuity…” This is indeed an oversimplification, for responsiveness could be a necessary but not sufficient parameter for life.
Let’s read one more verse from the same Prana Hymn:
The expression “existing and having existed, he’s born again” alludes to a repetitive formation, something that propagates infinitely, endlessly, like a wave. In the context of energy, it cannot be anything but electromagnetic waves. It could very well be, as we know now, the gravitational waves, too. But that was doubtless not what the composers of the Atharva Veda could have known. Nevertheless, the fact that they did visualise an endless wave like formation is in itself incredible.
Jagadish Chandra often talked about a Mahashakti, “by whom the non-living and the living, the atom and the universe are all powered…” It could only be conjectured that he was trying to unite the quantum and gravitational forces, which Einstein had envisaged but couldn’t prove during his lifetime. Fortunately, Penn State University’s Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry has been talking about unifying Einstein’s general relativity and quantum physics since 2007.
Jagadish and Einstein did meet in the 1920s when both were members of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. But whether they discussed these topics is not known.
Around the same idea of the Mahashakti, “by whom the non-living and the living, the atom and the universe are all powered,” Tagore wrote a wonderful poem in Gitanjali, calling it the Stream of Life:
Since the Rig Vedic times, life has been associated with a stream or taranga, a wave. So, Prana, which means both life and energy, has always been connected with waves in the minds of the ancient sages.
“The idea of ether (Akasha),” Vivekananda said in a lecture in London in 1896, “is to be found in our ancient literature in forms much more developed than is the modern scientific theory…” It was on that day, after the lecture, that Jagadish Chandra and Vivekananda would have met for the first time, and the two would have developed an instant fondness for each other. In a few years, Jagadish’s research turned more and more towards Advaita Vedanta, seeking unity in everything, living and non-living, animals and plants. That also became his nemesis, in a way.
In the Raja Yoga, Vivekananda wrote, “At the beginning and at the end everything becomes Akasha, and all the forces in the universe resolve back into the Prana…” By “everything,” he meant all the matter of the universe, and by “forces,” energy. So, he clearly called out that all the matter and energy of the universe, at the beginning and end, resolve respectively into Akasha and Prana, the universal matter and energy, thus moving very close to That One.
Around the same time, Vivekananda referred to a meeting with Nikola Tesla, alluding to something that’s astounding, given its profound implication. “Mr. Tesla thinks,” Vivekananda wrote to E. T. Sturdy from New York in February 1896, “he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy…”
According to Vivekananda’s letter, Tesla claimed that force or energy and matter could be reducible to energy almost a decade before Einstein came up with the E = MC squared equation in 1905. If Tesla had really realised this, then it’s another example of using “operational principles” and imagination to visualize something, even without knowing the technical nitty-gritty. Imagination and visualisation, we will see, are related to consciousness.
Now, let’s turn towards Nikola Tesla. We do find a continuity in his thought about the convertibility of matter and energy. In a lecture just before the 1893 Chicago Exposition, where he met Vivekananda either during or before the Parliament of Religions, he said, “[Ether] has properties such that even a scientifically trained mind cannot help drawing a distinction between it and all that is called matter.” At that time, people believed ether to be superfine matter. However, Tesla felt that it had certain properties which made it appear like something else. Did he mean that it also appeared to him like energy, thus alluding to the matter-energy non-dualism?
A year earlier, Tesla had given a lecture at London’s Royal Institution. “The atom is tossed about in space eternally,” he said there. “Were it to stop its motion, it would die… There is no death of matter, for throughout the infinite universe, all has to move, to vibrate, that is, to live.” Here, he alludes to a universe that’s “alive,” always moving and vibrating. It’s almost a paraphrase of the Prana Hymn from the Atharva Veda: Prana rules over all.
A very important thought that comes up here, and which we will come to again soon, is that the universe is all about being “alive,” about vibrating, moving. Conversely, it could be said that when the universe didn’t exist, there was no vibration, and everything was at absolute rest. More on this later.
At another place, Tesla said, “Lord Kelvin expressed his belief that life’s process is electrical.” And then, in 1899, in a seminal interview, he proclaimed, “Electricity I am. Or, if you wish, I am the electricity in the human form… I am part of a light…”
Here, he sounds very confident and speaks with absolute alacrity. “I AM THAT,” he says, replacing THAT with Electricity. He makes it very clear that not only is the universal life process electrical, but he himself is electricity and “part of a light,” thus resolving everything in the universe to THAT ONE. Simplistically, he calls THAT ONE electricity or light. To be a little more accurate, THAT ONE is a combination of electromagnetic, quantum, and gravitational force or energy, all of which, again, could be ONE, as Einstein had envisaged.
For the sake of simplicity, we will stick only to electromagnetic energy.
***
We have discussed Akasha and Prana, matter and energy. Let’s now move on to Consciousness.
“How would I know that I exist if I had not the eye?” Tesla said in a lecture. “For knowledge involves consciousness; consciousness involves conceptions; conceptions involve images, and images the sense of vision...”
Consciousness derives from conception, which is born out of images created when energy in the form of light stimulates the sensory organs, the eyes, resulting in vision. So, we have:
Consciousness <-- Conception <-- Image <-- Vision <-- Energy
Representing energy simplistically by electromagnetic waves, we get:
Consciousness <-- Imagination <-- Image <-- Electromagnetic Waves
So, if consciousness can be simply reduced to an after-effect of our sensory organs stimulated by electromagnetic waves, then do animals, plants, or even the apparently non-living objects possess consciousness? A verse from the Atharva Veda gives the answer to that, which we will analyse with modern neuroscience.
Righteousness, ritam; truth, satyam; great endeavours, tapas; empire, rasthtra; religion, dharma; and enterprise, karma;
The past and future; heroism, virya; prosperity, lakshmi; strength, bala, [dwell] in the “strength of the superfluous,” ucchishta bala.
Referring to the verse, Tagore wrote in the article “The Sense of Art” for the 1928 French publication Feuilles de l'Inde, “All that is inert and inanimate is limited to the bare fact of existence. Ucchishta is the motive force of all that makes for perfection… Most of [what humans have] belong to the superfluous, that is needed only for self-expression and not for self-preservation…”
The “superfluous” is what enables humans to imagine something that almost no other living being is capable of doing. The rest can barely self-preserve and sustain their lives, whereas humans are the only ones who can imagine and self-express their imaginations and inspirations through speech.
To understand the “superfluous,” we must resort to neuroscience. We will use a technique that early humans adopted when they attempted to create abstract thoughts fuelled by their newly acquired imaginations. “In the early days of human civilisation, whenever man wished to have words for abstract things, like strength, power, etc.,” Sri Aurobindo pointed out, “his readiest method was to apply simplistic ideas of physical actions.”
Many words for strength across all languages, Aurobindo elaborated, had originally this idea of a force or injury because that was what it meant to the early humans to secure their existence and prove their strength and superiority in this world.
We will take the physical act of “biting” and analyse how imagination can convert that into abstract thoughts like “dexterity” and “wonderous deeds.”
When I bite a chunk of meat, a series of related violent actions, like hurting, cutting, tearing, and separating, come into play. Accordingly, the similar sounding Sanskrit roots dams, damsh, and daksh all have hurting, cutting, tearing, and separating as one of their meanings. Related words in various languages with close-to-similar meanings are দংশন, damshan, in Bengali, डसना, dasna, in Hindi, dakno in Greek, and tang in English.
When I bite, light from the bitten, torn, and cut meat stimulates my eyes. Electric impulses from my retina travel to my brain through the nerve wires. The brain activates multiple sets or circuits of Motor Neurons, each set responsible for one kind of experience, which, in neuroscience parlance, is called Explicit Perception. One set of neurons could be activated, say, for the perception of the pressure felt on the teeth, another for the tearing off of a portion of the meat moments later, and one more for the pain when a bone hits the mouth’s palate.
Some other times, when I don’t bite myself but observe someone else doing so, circuits of Mirror Neurons, comprising most of the neurons activated earlier, get into action, and I have the same perception as before. The Mirror Neuron circuits are called Functional Modules, FMs.
Sometime later, when I neither bite nor observe someone else biting, a certain Functional Module still produces mental images of a previous experience, say, “tearing” apart a chunk of meat. This is Implicit Perception or Imagery. Another Functional Module produces the imagery of “separating” the flesh from the bones.
So, Imagery is the capability of neural circuits to provide a representation of an act or object that is not currently present in the subject’s sensory environment, but of which the subject has had previous experience. Imagery provides the basic elements necessary for Imagination and is arguably present also in other species.
At this point, the power of the superfluous, ucchista bala, comes into play in humans, fuelling Imagination. For example, the FMs responsible for the imageries of “tearing” a chunk of meat and “separating” the flesh from the bones combine into innovative mosaics, resulting in the Imagination of separating the “good” from the “bad.” That’s when the word daksha, meaning dexter, someone with the power to distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, arises out of the root daksh, whose original meaning is to cut, hurt, etc.
Combining many more FMs into more complex mosaics, abstract and original concepts about, say, dasra, wonder worker, and puru-damsas, rich in wonderous deeds, evolve from “good” and “right” actions, all coming from the basic sense of hurting, cutting, biting, etc. The terms dasra and puru-damsas are found in the Rig Veda as epithets for the twin-Gods Ashvins. That’s when Imagination becomes Inspiration and Consciousness, Ritam-Satyam-Vrihat, the Absolute Right and Truth: more about that later.
Imagination is, then, the capability of neural circuits to combine in novel ways images with a direct perceptual origin and concepts to produce original images and speculations.
The FM mosaics of the Imagery Neuron Systems necessary for Imagination are nothing but complex neural circuits. With close to 30.000 synapses per neuron, only humans can create such complex circuits. In comparison, rats and mice have a third fewer synapses per neuron. So, ucchishta bala, or the power of the superfluous, is the excess electrical connections of the synapses that no other species have.
Today, we have established, though simplistically, an equivalence between consciousness and electromagnetic waves, energy in a more general sense, which is again connected to matter through Einstein’s E = MC squared equation. So, the three names – consciousness, energy, and matter – the vipra, the wise, call That One by, as seen in a verse from the Rig Veda, indeed converge to the same thing.
That’s Advaita-vaad, the theory of One-ness.
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