The basic idea that the world is entirely composed of electromagnetic energy is not in any sense a new idea. Bertrand Russell was saying very much the same thing in the 1920s in writing about the conception of the physical world which had emerged from the current advances in physics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. And this was a major upset for the ideas which had held sway in the nineteenth century, when crude, old-fashioned materialism was in vogue. So the Einsteinian and other changes in the early years of the last century were a nasty shock to many!

But what was regarded as particularly bizarre at that time was, firstly, that all the substantial matter of which the world was made, seemed to be simply another form of the ubiquitous electromagnetic waves. This seemed all wrong to those who shared the same attitude as Dr Johnson when he was faced with Bishop Berkeley’s suggestion that the whole world actually existed only in the mind and was asked to say what he thought about it. He stamped his very substantial foot on the ground and said firmly: ‘I refute it thus!’ Electromagnetic waves are familiar to us as things like light, (or, at other wavelengths, radio waves, X-rays and cosmic rays), but to be told that matter could be equated with such insubstantial things in accordance with Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, was something quite difficult to accept. Energy is not a kind of stuff or substance, still less is it the traditional notion of hard, solid matter. It is just a description of a kind of activity, but in no sense substantial. Energy is simply energetic movement, whether of waves or electrical charges or whatever. Matter seemed quite different. But, apparently, it wasn’t!

As Bertrand Russell put it at the time:

Matter as it appears to common sense, and as it has until recently appeared in physics, must be given up. The old idea of matter was connected with the idea of ‘substance’, and this, in turn, with a view of time that the theory of relativity shows to be untenable.... ‘Matter’ is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn’t. I am talking physics, not metaphysics.... Materialism as a philosophy becomes hardly tenable in view of this elaboration of matter. (An Outline of Philosophy, 1927.)

The flippant comment which had appeared in Punch in 1855 seemed all too apposite:

What is matter? Never mind! What is mind? No matter!

And there was a second discovery about electromagnetic radiation, made at about the same time by Michelson and Morley, which was even stranger still: namely, that in spite of prolonged, careful and repeated experiments to detect it, it proved impossible to detect any underlying medium, the so-called ether, in and through which the waves were travelling. It was like finding the whole universe apparently existing in (and indeed as) a vast ocean or field of electromagnetic activity, but with no sign of anything corresponding to the water. It had, of course, originally been taken almost for granted that there must be such an underlying medium through which the waves were travelling, and this postulated continuum had been confidently called ‘the ether’. But after many careful experiments, it became clear that there was not a shred of evidence for the expected existence of such a medium. It was all very paradoxical. Russell, who always wrote clearly and pithily about science, put it that the scientists, in abolishing matter, had left us with an insubstantial world amounting to no more than ‘a wave of probability undulating in nothingness’.

There did not seem to be anything filling Newton’s Absolute Time and Space, and these concepts too were soon swept away by the Theory of Relativity.

But, notwithstanding its insubstantiality, those who put their faith in the truth revealed by science, regard the entire physical universe as a product of electromagnetic energy. They admit there are still many things to find out about it, but have no real doubts about the capacity of scientific investigation to tackle them and eventually solve the mystery; and they would point to the tremendous success of science in the last 400 years in enlightening us about the world. We can sum up the current view of what we may call ‘orthodox science’ as being that the ‘material world’ is entirely composed of a play of electromagnetic energy on a vast and cosmic scale. And it is insubstantial. So-called ‘matter’ is nothing but energy in another form.

You may very reasonably say about this view: ‘I can see that what you describe may explain the inorganic world of solid, inanimate matter, but what about life and the world of the mind, and, in particular, what about consciousness?’ Some of the scientists most dedicated to the orthodox view have (to their credit) begun to recognize the great importance of the answer to this question. They do not deny this, but they remain convinced that it is only a matter of time until science solves the mystery.

In his recently published book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, the Nobel Prizewinner, Francis Crick, has suggested that the nature of consciousness and an examination of the conditions which produce it, is the great, still unsolved, mystery facing science, and that there is a pressing need that we should find the scientific explanation of this phenomenon now! His belief is that we shall come to understand it by finding how exactly the brain works. But he is critical of the attempts to do this up to now. His general thesis follows the lines of the nineteenth century materialist view that consciousness was something emerging as a totally new phenomenon in association with the evolution of living things, and reaching its fullest present potential in association with the human brain. A popular scientific dogma at that time was that ‘the brain produces consciousness as the liver secretes bile’ and Crick’s recent proposition — the self-styled Astonishing Hypothesis — is a more sophisticated variant of this view. Stated in his own words:

The astonishing hypothesis is that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free-will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurones!’

Crick argues that:

The case for a scientific attack on the problem of consciousness is extremely strong. The only doubts are how to go about it, and when. What I am urging is that we should pursue it now.

It is worth asking what it is about consciousness which is such a mystery, and why it constitutes such a problem in the world conceived by the scientist as entirely made of electromagnetic energy. It is surely at least partly because it inevitably and inescapably introduces the duality of a subject and an object of experience into our concept of reality. We have to consider both the ‘I’ — the conscious subject — and ‘it’, the surrounding world which we experience before our eyes and other senses. But the ‘I’ introduces an entirely new element, and not just one further detail in the world around us. The orthodox scientific view however is that this is simply a new emergent development in nature, with nothing exceptional about it. They might liken it to the sudden evolutionary arrival of land animals emerging from the sea. In evolution, Crick would point out, consciousness has been particularly associated with the development of the higher animals and finally man, especially with his brain. There is a parallel here in Vedanta, where empirical consciousness is closely associated with the appearance of what the yogis call ‘the inner organ of experience’ or antahkarana.

The World as Experience
Let us now turn to our second world-view, the view of the yogis, which is formulated in the Vedanta philosophy. How does this compare with the modern scientist’s viewpoint? The first point to be made is that there is essentially complete agreement between the sages of the ancient Upanishads and the conclusions of modern science as regards the nature of the world as a creation of energy. This may be regarded as astonishing, but both hold that the external world is produced by the play of energy or power. Maya-Shakti is the Vedantic name for this creative power, and Nature, its creation, is called Prakriti in Sanskrit. The two camps also agree in finding that the created world is insubstantial.

But, you may well ask, is all this not likely to be a pure coincidence, since the ancient sages had no idea of science and its methods and were in no position to do so thousands of years ago? But the similarities are even closer and more surprising than if they just represented arriving at the same rough idea. Vedanta describes the world of nature or Prakriti as being made up of three main qualities or gunas, characterizing the three aspects of the movement of the moving thing (Jagat). There is not time to go into these in detail here, but they correspond closely when carefully examined to the three Laws of Motion discovered by Newton in the seventeenth century, a point which you can find elaborated in the Autumn 2001 number of Self- Knowledge (pp. 177-178). How could this coincidence be explained? Perhaps one answer to that is to say that the ancient sages didn’t need to discover these things by modern scientific methods because they had insight gained from their deep pondering on the nature of reality. Even Newton claimed that he made his great discoveries by ‘thinking about them all the time’, and his exceptional capacity for prolonged meditation was well attested. In this connection it is good to remind ourselves that Einstein, who revolutionised modern physics and its view of the world, never did a single experiment, nor did he use any scientific equipment, to create his Theory of Relativity. He made all his discoveries with pencil and paper and by thinking deeply about the problem and about the world around him.

The Vedanta is certainly ancient. Swami Rama Tirtha, when he went to Japan in October 1902 to speak to the assembled Japanese at what had been planned to be a Parliament of Religions, told them:

The religion that Rama brings to Japan is virtually the same as was brought centuries ago by the followers of the holy Buddha. But the same religion requires to be dealt with from an entirely different standpoint to suit it to the needs of the present age. It requires to be blazoned forth in the light of Western science and philosophy.

Equally interesting is what an English High Court Judge in India has to say on the subject. Sir John Woodroffe became interested in the writings of the old Vedantic classics on the theory that the world was a product of Power or Energy, and became an authority on these writings, even among Indians. He wrote in 1921:

Indian philosophy and religion are too often treated in an archaeological way as things which have been and are gone, unrelated to and without value for current thought, and they do not receive the attention and respect which is their due. My own conviction is that an examination of the Indian Vedanta doctrine shows that it is in conformity with the most advanced scientific and philosophic thought of the West and that where this is not so, it is science which will go to Vedanta and not the reverse. (The World as Power: Reality. Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1921.)

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