Brian: I have been following the science of black holes and the event horizon, and you brought this up in your talk on Sunday. Can you explain in more detail how this relates to Vedanta’s understanding of life?
Sundari: I am not a scientist, but as Vedanta is the ultimate science of life, it can explain all things mithya. The scientific community is really fascinating because you have some of the finest minds on the planet working out really subtle things about how the field of experience (or life) works, yet they have no idea what Consciousness is! They are so close and yet so far. And the truth will elude them as long as they believe that Consciousness is a function of the brain, and not the other way around. Yet the more enlightened ones know that this cannot be true because it just does not make sense. They have identified the Unified Field and the forces that govern it, and they know that there is a knower of it because quantum physics proves it.
Quantum Mechanics reliably demonstrates that anything known is subject to the observer, but they do not know who the observer is. Scientists think it is the mind, not Consciousness shining on the mind. The problem with QM is it introduces randomness and probabilities, not certainties. It shows that nothing in the quantum field can be measured because it is not ‘in time’. At the subatomic level, particles do not behave according to any of the laws of physics as they are currently understood. So, scientists are stuck because their means of knowledge are the senses. Though they can infer that the senses do not give the whole story, their epistemology does not allow them to make the leap to identifying the knower as the one non-negatable Self, Consciousness appearing as the scientist.
I too have been following the latest take on Black Holes, and things are getting very interesting. As you probably know, a Black Hole is a ‘place in space’ (for want of a better term, it’s not a place) where the force of gravity pulls so much that even light is trapped. Gravity is so strong because all matter has been squeezed into a very small space, such as when a star is dying. We know, thanks to Einstein, that matter cannot be destroyed; it only changes form. And though forms change, science knows that the blueprint (information) for all forms is eternal and cannot be destroyed. This is in keeping with what Vedanta says. Though nothing in the field is real, everything in the apparent reality originates from and is stored as a vasana in the Causal body, another name for Isvara, or Maya. Maya is an eternal principle in Awareness.
Since Steven Hawkins discovered that black holes have a temperature (because they emit radiation), it has come as a shock to the scientific community that given enough time, black holes will evaporate or explode. What happens then to the blueprints of objects if everything contained in the black hole is blown into a random fizz of particles or featureless radiation? Where does the information go, and is knowledge ‘stored’ anywhere? It cannot disappear because they have proved that with Einstein’s theory, E = MCs.
This has been driving the community crazy for years now; Hawkins died without solving it. Some scientists have come up with a hypothesis that nobody likes, but it is now looking to be kind of unavoidable, much like the science of quantum physics was when it first appeared, proving essentially that no object exists independent of observation. This was already a step towards negating the apparent reality of life! But this has gone further now. The observation that black holes can evaporate sent scientists scurrying to find a plausible explanation for where knowledge goes, and they think they may have found it.
They are now trying to prove that the information is stored somehow in the outer layers of the black hole, in what they call the ‘event horizon’, which is a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer, or be affected by an observer, i.e., not subject to observation or change. So, scientists think they can solve the conundrum of where knowledge goes when black holes disappear, as, from the event horizon, all changing objects (including the black hole) are mere holographic representations of information encoded in the unchanging event horizon.
This is pretty wild! I think from this we can extrapolate that the Event Horizon is the Causal body, or Isvara, because Isvara is really ever-present, unchanging Awareness. The Black Hole (Maya-Beautiful Intelligent Ignorance), the jiva, and the world it apparently experiences are all holographs. And we know that a holograph is not real! So, we could say that science is catching up with what Vedanta has been saying all along: nothing in the world has any substance; it is all a mirage appearing in you, Consciousness. All objects, including our bodies, are just trapped light!Â
Everything we experience is thanks to the presence of Consciousness, the one principle that can never be negated, even in the event horizon. If there was no Consciousness present, how could the Self in the form of the scientist know about such a thing as a black hole or an event horizon?! This is akin to the deep sleep prakriya; though the mind is not present in deep sleep, how would you know you slept if Consciousness was not there to observe it?
It is unlikely that scientists will prove the Holographic theory. Even if they do, they will not accept that Consciousness was there before the appearance of the creation, during and ‘after’ the creation, or when the black hole disappears. I.e., after the creation is withdrawn back into Consciousness at the end of the creation cycle. They do know that you can never get rid of the substratum, the unified field. But what they cannot register is that Consciousness is another name for the unified field, or what Vedanta refers to as “Existence with a capital ‘E”.
If an object appears before you, Consciousness’ appears before you in a different form. It may not be conscious as it is only a reflection, but it is nonetheless, Consciousness—although Consciousness is not it. It can only be Consciousness because the nature of reality is non-dual Consciousness. Only when Maya appears does a creation appear in name and form, which (seems to) obscure existence, Consciousness, as in the Black Hole. Before that, there was only nameless, formless undifferentiated nondual Consciousness, with all powers present in it, including the power to obscure.
That is a stretch for the materialists who argue that there is no way to verify non-duality, which is true, from the dualistic standpoint from which they look at it. If your epistemology for knowing anything is based on the senses, the only knowledge you can gain is through inference, based on perception. Sensory perception is not capable of knowing or understanding Consciousness because it is an effect; it is the subject. The subject cannot know the cause, the object because the object (Consciousness) is subtler than the subject. Consciousness is who we are.Â
Consciousness/Existence is not an object of perception because it is that which makes perception possible. There is no way from within the creation to understand this. And sadly, science is stuck trying to prove the unprovable within Maya. It is only through the Vedanta pramana that ignorance of the true nature of reality can be removed by Self-knowledge. Science is being forced to agree that there is no evidence other than that gained by the senses that creation is anything more than an appearance, one that we take to be real. But it is not real, as we know, and as scientists are starting to understand, if only hypothetically–real defined by that which is always present and unchanging, which can only be ascribed to Consciousness supporting all objects, the only constant factor.
If you have a better understanding of the science involved in Black Holes, or a better theory of how it relates to the Science of Consciousness, I would love to hear it.
Much love
Sundari
