To celebrate Swamiji’s Jyanthi at Janita’s place in France, I thought I would give a talk, based on a quote from Swamiji and finishing with a quote from Swamiji too.
30 years ago, Swami Gitananda told me:
“PHYSICS and YOGA are on a crash course!”
He did not mean that they would wipe each other out, but that they would come together… both in different ways, looking for the nature of reality.
So, I have not used my words, on my take on this, but have used quotes, direct from the source.
Where to start?.. At the very beginning…
Part 1 – Cosmology
Yoga:
The Rig Veda 6000-7000 years old (the oldest religious text known to man):
“FIRST THERE IS BRAHMAN LORD OF ALL, WITH WHOM IS VACH, THE WORD, AND THE WORD VERILY IS BRAHMAN”
(What is a word? It is a sound; A sound is vibration… vibration is ENERGY).
Physics:
“If you want to find the secret of the universe, think in terms of ENERGY, FREQUENCY, VIBRATION” – Nikola Tesla
Yoga:
“OM, the unstruck sound is the primordial VIBRATION from which the rest of creation emerges”. – Rig Veda
Physics:
“13.7 billion years ago, the universe simply burst into existence, an event called the BIG BANG!” – Dr Stephen Hawking
Yoga:
“Before this world was, the Self alone existed and nothing else, neither that which is active nor that which is non-active. He willed ‘I WILL CREATE THE WORLDS’”. – Attareya Upanishad
Physics:
“Light did not exist, space did not exist either, there was no outside – the only place was inside”. – Dr Stephen Hawking
Yoga:
“Before the universe and galaxies came into being, only the INHERENT POTENTIAL existed”. – Mundaka Upanishad
Physics:
“The singularity of seemingly infinite density and mass, thought to have contained space/time of the universe before quantum fluctuations caused it to expand and inflate creating the present universe”. – Lothar Schaffe (Professor emeritus of physical chemistry)
Yoga:
“From its own meditation, Brahman expands. A seed with INFINITE POTENTIAL”. – Mundaka Upanishad
Physics:
“The Universe simply inflates into existence”.
Yoga:
“The universe is simply an opening out of expansion of the Supreme as SHAKTI”. – 9thC Shiva Sutra
Physics:
The universe began as a very hot small and dense superforce. It was a very tiny ultra-hot fog of energy. Then it expanded from a flash of radiation, from the size of an atom to the size of an orange in a trillionth of a second”. – Dr Stephen Hawking
Yoga:
From this seed with infinite potential comes the life force. From life force universal mind evolves, mind gives birth to the essential elements, and from these, the many worlds and all their planes of existence take form”. – Mundaka Upanishad
Physics:
In the 1930s, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was the first physicist who systematically pursued aspects of spirit in the quantum phenomena. He said “The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal mind”.
Yoga:
“All this universe is pervaded by ME in my unmanifested form; All beings exist in ME, but I do not abide in them”. – Bhagavad Gita
Physics:
“The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine”. – Sir James Jeans
Yoga:
Intelligence is the basic value of all creation, and of all processes of progress and evolution is creation. It is the fundamental of all existences. This field of pure intelligence, which is one, non-dual, by virtue of its perpetual, external, immortal existence starts to regenerate itself through its own nature, by virtue of its own existence”. – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Physics:
“The new form of insight can perhaps best be called ‘Undivided wholeness in flowing movement’”. – Father of Quantum Physics Dr David Bohm
Yoga:
“Creatures from the unmanifest into the manifest and then back to the unmanifest dear Bharata”. – Bhagavad Gita
Physics:
So just as Quantum physics discovered that a particle can be in more than one place at a time, and that particles can come out of ‘nought’ and back into ‘nought’”. – Dr John Hagel
Physics:
According to the Akasha paradigm, the observable phenomena of the world are manifestations of an in-itself unobservable fundamental dimension.
It is in that dimension that manifest phenomena arise, and it is in that dimension that the laws of their interaction are encoded.” – Ervin Laszlo (Systems Scientist / President of International Think Tank)
SAT – CHIT – ANANDA
P.S. You have probably heard that there is no sound in space, but technically that is not true. Yes, space is a virtual vacuum, however sound does exist in the form of electronic vibrations that pulsate in similar wavelength. You can even hear recordings of some sounds in space on the NASA website!
Try it!
Originally published in YOGA LIFE March 2019 Vol. 50 No. 3