Oneness and Multiplicity

Every sentient being is a locus of manifestation of forms and qualities that express attributes of an infinite One Reality

From the perspective of perennial wisdom, oneness is the essential nature of all existence. God is the source and ground of all existence: “The ocean is the supreme Self. The waves are the selves, the individual souls. The ocean never changes; it remains as the substratum of all the waves that arise in it. The supreme Self manifests as selves in different forms and different shapes. The forms and shapes appear and disappear, but the essential principle, the substratum, that is, the Divine Self, remains forever unchanged, just like the ocean.” (Omkara Divya Porule)

One the other hand, Scientific materialism, the dominant philosophy and universal worldview of our age, is essentially the opposite of this vision of oneness: it is fragmentation taken to its extreme. It begins with the premise that the fundamental basis of everything in the universe is material particles that exist independent of consciousness. These particles are then combined to produce molecules, cells, organisms, and consciousness, like a huge machine with innumerable interacting parts.

Virtually all other sciences of the inner and outer worlds have followed this lead and attempt to understand everything mechanistically in terms of a set of separate interacting parts. This superficial focus on fragmentation, while overlooking the underlying oneness, has produced great technological advances, but as a worldview it is ignorance, avidiya, toxic to the individual and to humanity.

David Bohm, Einsteins most prolific student, says that “the attempt to live according to the notion that these fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who have to live in it.” (Bohm, 1982)

Fortunately the very thirst for knowledge that drives science, the search for the unitary principle that underlies all phenomena, is pushing it beyond its materialist limits. In particular, the discovery that consciousness may be intrinsic to the fundamental laws of matter has put science back on the path to oneness.

However, attempts to analyze the nature of consciousness using scientific methods and materialist premises have led to a great deal of nonsense and confusion. Fortunately consciousness is the one thing that any of us can observe directly, but very few people choose to do so. Our spiritual teachers tell us: “Everyone is always saying ‘I’, ‘I’, but no one asks what the I really is. Learn by looking into the mirror of your own mind”.

Formless conscious awareness

So following their lead and looking inward, let us recall our experience in meditation, as thinking slows down and we begin to experience gaps between thoughts. In these gaps we obtain a glimpse of the witness, the subject of all our observations, which is conscious awareness itself. In this state we can observe our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as they arise as objects within the field of conscious awareness, the subject. And we find that all form, all attributes, structure, properties, and defining characteristics, belong to the objects of consciousness. The subject is absolutely formless, it has no objective properties. We can never observe our own conscious awareness as an object. Our experience of our own conscious awareness is a form of “knowledge by identity”, in which the subject and object are one: We know it because we are it (Forman, 1990).

The recognition that conscious awareness is formless has profound implications. Scientific materialism posits that everything in the universe, including consciousness, is a complex machine build up of material particles and fields. These forms when combined can only produce more complex forms. However, there is no way to combine forms in order to produce something that is formless. This tells us that conscious awareness can never be the product of any combination of atoms or biological cells or silicon processors. The physical brain cannot possibly give rise to conscious awareness, because the brain is simply a complex combination of forms, and no combination of forms can give rise to that which has no form.

We are then driven to conclude that formless conscious awareness has to be fundamental, prior to form, it can’t be the product of any formal substrate.

Atoms are not things

So then, what is the relation between this non-material conscious awareness and the material world that we appear to inhabit? To address this question we have to go back to fundamentals and take a fresh look at our assumptions about the material world.

For example, how do we know that the chair we are sitting in exists? We have a visual and tactile experience of the chair which consist of a coordinated co-arising of perceptions that appear as objects within the field of conscious awareness. Visually, a pattern of shapes and colors arises which the mind groups together and labels as a chair. Because this correlated pattern of forms persists in time and space, we assume that a material chair exists in an external physical world that is independent of consciousness. This physical object is called the “thing in itself”, whereas our perception of the object in conscious awareness is called the “phenomenon”. We never observe or experience things in themselves directly, their existence is always inferred based on persistent patterns in phenomena (Kastrup, 2014, 2021).

Classical science is based on the assumption that things in themselves, the collection of material objects that makes up the physical universe, is the fundamental basis of all reality. Modern physics however is seriously undermining this assumption. In the words of Werner Heisenberg, one of the principal founders of modern physics, “an electron is not a thing”, meaning that there is no thing in itself that corresponds to our concept of a material particle. These particles have a phenomenal existence -we can observe a track in a cloud chamber- but whatever gives rise to that perception does not have an objective existence in space or time.

Niels Bohr, Another one of the founders of modern physics, says that “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real”.

The mystics tell us that “dreams are unreal but appear real when dreaming. Everything that we see is unreal but appears real to our senses”.

So in other words, in the dream state we can perceive a chair, and it seems real, but there is no thing in itself that gives rise to that perception. Similarly, in waking state, we may experience the chair, but again there is no thing in itself, no material object existing independent of consciousness, that gives rise to that experience.

The substratum of consciousness as source and ground

So where does this phenomenal chair come from? Looking within, we find that in both the dream state and the waking state, our experience of the chair arises in our awareness from the substratum of consciousness.

But if the universe only exists in our consciousness, how is it that there are many of us who seem to inhabit the same universe? Our universal cohabitation implies that there is an aspect of the substratum that is shared across all loci of manifestation (i.e. observers). And associated with this universal substratum there must be a universal consciousness, or Atman (Schrödinger, 1958).

Spiritual teachers reveal that “it is not the eye that sees anything. Nor is it the ear that hears anything. The power that enables seeing and hearing is the radiant Atman within.” The Atman is the source and ground, the substratum, of our conscious awareness.

Modern science is coming to a similar conclusion. The renowned physicist and historian of science, Sir James Jeans, says that the most important revelation of modern science is that “we are not yet in touch with ultimate reality. To speak in terms of Plato’s will know simile, we are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.” (Jeans, 1982) In this view the phenomenal universe is in some sense a projection of a deeper reality that is beyond the reach of science as we know it. From our perspective this “implicate order” can be identified with the substratum, the Atman.

So we conceive of the substratum as an infinite formless existence essentially free from all limitation by qualities, properties, and features, whose essential nature is oneness or unbroken wholeness. From this infinite arises a phenomenal universe teeming with numerable qualities properties and features whose nature is multiplicity. We can explore the relationship between these apparently incongruous existences from two perspectives, one based on scientific knowledge and the other based on spiritual knowledge.

Science and wholeness

Although the measuring instruments of science cannot interact with the substratum directly, scientists can still infer some of its properties from the observation of emergent phenomena such as quantum entanglement and wave-particle duality.

Following this approach, David Bohm (1982) declares that “relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context… science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view.”

He describes the substratum as “ a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.”

Bohm (1982) emphasizes that “the dynamic activity — internal and external — which is fundamental to what each part is, is based on its enfoldment of all the rest, including the whole universe . . . each part is in a fundamental sense internally related in its basic activities to the whole and to all the other parts.”

One spiritual reality birthing infinite diversity

In many ways this description is resonant with the spiritual perspective, which is empirically grounded in a direct knowledge-by-identity of the source and ground of Being.

Sri Aurobindo (1983) describes the essential oneness, the unbroken wholeness that is fundamental to the phenomenal multiplicity: “When we see with the inner vision and sense and not with the physical eye a tree or other object, what we become aware of is an infinite one Reality constituting the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation of indwelling energy; all of these are itself, are this infinite, this Reality: we see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is really separate… each object is that Infinite and one in essential being with all other objects that are also forms and names of the Infinite”.

Aurobindo (1983) describes the relation between phenomenal forms and the formless substratum, explaining the real nature of the qualities, properties, and features that we normally associate with the objects, the things in themselves, of an external universe: “the Divine is formless and nameless, but by that very reason capable of manifesting all possible names and shapes of being. Forms are manifestations, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing, for line and color, mass and design, which are the essentials of form carry always in them a significance; are , it might be said, secret values and significances of an unseen Reality made visible, conveying what would be otherwise hidden from the senses. Form can be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation of the formless”.

Aurobindo (1983) explains that although the phenomena are unreal in the sense that they, like dreams, do not represent things in themselves, they do possess a certain reality as expressions of that which lies implicit within our being: “The Self (Atman) becomes insect and bird and beast and man, but it is always the same Self through these mutations because it is the One who manifests himself infinitely in endless diversity. A real diversity brings out the real Unity, shows it as it were in its utmost capacity, reveals all that it can be and is in itself, delivers from its whiteness of hue the many tones of color that are fused together there. Oneness finds itself infinitely in what seems to be its opposite, but is really is really an inexhaustible diverse display of Unity.”

The universe is within us

So we find that everything we have believed about the universe and our place in it is imaginary. We believe that we are a individual being within a vast universe. We now find that every sentient being is a locus of manifestation of forms and qualities that express attributes of an infinite One Reality. We construct a conceptual universe to impose an order upon the qualities that emerge from the substratum. This constructed universe is entirely within us, as we are the locus of manifestation within which all of the qualities and associated conceptual constructions emerge. Thus by rational investigation, grounded in an empirical understanding of the nature of matter and consciousness, we arrive at the conclusion that Oneness is the source and ground of all existence.

References

See separate References blog post.