Welcome to the Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where Anu, Ashok, Conrad, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie11, Padmum and I write on the same topic. Please do visit the linked blogs to get nine different flavours of the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Conrad.
My late mother used to tell me often that when I was born, the first and that too a male child, I was the center of the universe. I don’t remember my father telling me this in my younger days but, in the initial days of his moving in with me, he used to say the same thing while reminiscing about those days and how he bought a brand new car to fetch me from the nursing home. My late wife was a captive audience and could understand this well, as when our son was born, he was the center of our universe too.
Two sons followed me and the novelty wore off I suppose. With three males in the household the future of the lineage was assured and so my parents decided to try till they produced a daughter to pamper. Six years after my birth, that ambition was achieved and we were blessed with a sister, the apple of all our eyes and yes, the center of our universe again.
With growth, all of us had our centers of universes in due course. And all of them, with a bit of luck are flourishing.
For all these centers, the universe itself kept expanding, as I am told on excellent authority, our real universe too is. It is an ever expanding entity with apparently no limit to its growth. Like my family’s centers, our earth which is for us the center of the universe is yet to come to grips with the fact that there could well be other centers of the universe. By that I mean of course that there could be other planets with life in them who may well be thinking exactly as we do about our own planet. I am sure that like my family’s flourishing centers, the other planets also must be flourishing.
In the Indian philosophical system, the Universe is called Brahman.
The word “Brahman” is traditionally derived from the verb ((brh)) (Sanskrit: to grow), and connotes greatness and infinity. The Mundaka Upanishad says: “Auṃ- That supreme Brahman is infinite, and this conditioned Brahman is infinite. The infinite proceeds from infinite. If you subtract the infinite from the infinite, the infinite remains alone.”
In other words, the center and the infinite are the same. David Bohm compares the phenomenon to a hologram. He describes all matter, and everything really, in an implicate order that we cannot perceive. The implicate order is like an interference pattern of energy waves, interacting with itself. He then goes onto say that consciousness receives these waves like a radio antenna receiving radio-waves and translates it into the explicit order: The world we normally experience. He also states that it provides explanation to phenomena such as quantum tunneling and, the one with particles being in two places at the same time.
Bohm was very much into Indian mysticism when he made this startling statements that has left the world of science in quite a conundrum.
For me, as a Vedantin/Advaitist, it makes eminent sense. I AM THE UNIVERSE AND THE UNIVERSE IS ME. There however cannot be a center!
After all that pontification, here is some food for thought.