Enlightenment is not for the Buddha alone by Tejinder Pal Singh

Tejinder Singh

Essay Abstract

The second law of thermodynamics provides the universe with an arrow of time. Living organisms are metastable states which, through the process of aging, are also subject to the second law. At the top of the living chain is humanity, with the human mind and the creative thought process possessing a tremendous ability to alter its environment. However, the mind is also an inefficient storehouse of redundant, repetitive and unproductive thinking. Combined with the mind`s acute ability to remember the past, and think about the future, such unproductive thinking can become a source of harmful negative emotions such as anger, hatred, worry, anxiety and fear, amongst others. It is possible to overcome such unpleasant consequences resulting from the ever-thinking mind, by realizing that there is a underlying thoughtless state - Consciousness. An individual who operates from the state of a conscious I, then lives in the Here and Now, and is happier, and at peace with oneself, and more likely to contribute constructively and compassionately to the task at hand. It is this state that humanity should collectively strive to steer towards. If this can be achieved, even to a partial degree, it will become easier for humankind to address and resolve the practical threats and challenges we face on our planet today.

Author Bio

The author is a professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India. His research interests are in quantum gravity, foundations of quantum mechanics, and cosmology. Personal home page: www.tifr.res.in/~tpsingh

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Hasmukh Tank

Dear Prof. Tejinder Pal Singh,

1. I feel very happy, that a professor of physics is interested in subjects like 'consciousness', and 'meditation'!

Hope, you will be glad to read my attempt titled:"On the nature of consciousness, space, and omni-presence of GOD" describing possible physics involved in 'consciousness': http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/viewFile/290/335

2. Just as a doctor prescribes some pain-killer for temporariy-relief and medicines for permanent cure, so exactly, the meditation in a quiet room can make our minds stronger to seek answers to the problems before us. The permanaent peace of mind can be attained when all the doubts get resolved. e.g. physicists have been struggling hard, for nine decades, to understand whether light and 'matter' are 'particles' or 'waves'? As soon as the puzzle gets resolved, as described in the following link, our minds come to rest. Like this all our doubts need to be scientifically resolved; to attain permanent peace. Here is the link explaining wave/particle-duality:

http://vixra.org/pdf/1403.0947v1.pdf

3.You will also be delighted to read my essay in this contest, titled "On the emergence of physical world from the ultimate reality'

With my best regards,

Hasmukh K. Tank

Tejinder Singh

Thank you very much, for your remarks - am very happy to know we agree on the benefits of meditation. I will read for essay and leave comments on your essay page, and also see the links you quote.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

Wilhelmus de Wilde

dear professor Pal Singh,

Your essay is an enrichment of the "ordinary" physical thinking.

Indeed we "think" that we are the "top" of living things, but this top is only aware with FIVE senses, so it is is very limited, 95% of our "material" universe is not understood, so we use the words "black" and "dark", indeed not to recognized by our senses, so the TOP is very relative...

It seems that our created reality is "driven by Laws", these laws however are based on memories that we have of experiments within our own created reality.

It is also my perception that the Planck length and time are the limits of causality, after that I introduce the non-caused Total Simulatneity.

Sometimes I am thinking about "entropy" and imagine that when we cut out all the words of a dictionary and throw those words in the air, the new order of words will probably not be the same as before , but every time we throw up the new order is as unique as the former (including the for us comprehensible book), so what is "order" and entropy ?

Your "Timeless Consciousness" has great paralels with my "non-causal (non-caused) consciousness. I hope that you can read my perception of consciousness [link:fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1991] in my essay "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS?"[:link].

We have the same end goal : enlightenment, my perception is that the deeper merging of non-caused consciousness and its conscious part become more ONE. Dear professor I hope that you can find some spare time to read my essay (link above) and also leave a comment on my thread, eventually I would be oblidged if you can give it a rating that is corresponding to your appreciation.

best regards

Wilhelmus

Tejinder Singh

Hello and thank you. I agree it is a very limited top, but hope you will agree that researchers are pushing at the edge. I also agree on the importance of memory in establishing laws, but since things seem to fit together across minds into a universal pattern then I would very favorably assign objectivity to those laws.

My reference to entropy and order is very much in the standard spirit of statistical mechanics.

I had already browsed through your essay and noted the commonality between ours - I will definitely read your essay again and leave comments on your page in the coming days.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

Ram Bansal

Dear Dr Singh,

I am delighted to read your essay and the valuable thoughts there in. I have rated also your essay.

Each of us has a right to enlightenment. Indeed, Buddha was not at all enlightened but was fooling the World. This is my well considered view derived from my researches in Vedic Scriptures..

Tejinder Singh

Thank you for your comments.

I am very intrigued by your remarks that Buddha was not enlightened but fooling the world, and that you derive this inference from the Vedas. I will be grateful if you could elaborate on this point with more remarks. Thank you.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

sridattadev kancharla

Dear Dr Tejinder Pal,

Let me start by saying I love you and what you have written. It is word by word what I feel inside of me every living moment, it seems that I in all of us is trying to reveal the truth to the human kind. I know it is the case with many of us who are consciously evolved at every moment.

Please read

[link:sridattadev-theoryofeverything.blogspot.com/2010/08/conscious-awakening.html]Levels of consciousness[/].

Yes, there is a mathematical equation for the absolute universal truth of conscious I, and it is zero = i = infinity

Regarding your thoughts on a system to be adapted by everyone at all stages in life, internet is the best medium to do that. It is for this reason I have created a custom search engine and a portal of portals

Any Body Can Do - Everything For Good to popularize the truth.

I am a father of 3 little boys of ages 8,6 and 3 and I know it is not an easy task to teach them some good behavior and not to fight with each other with out enticing them with some gifts. It's amazing how even though they are biological brothers in the shorter frame of time and space of a single family, they tend to fight so vehemently sometimes. Now I can understand this situation extrapolated to a large scale of human kind, which easily forgets the truth of brotherhood and fights. It is for this reason we need to find ways to remind us all of who we really are and hence the fancy website to grab the attention. You might find categories in the website which are purely entertaining as it is a crucial part of enticing an ever wandering human mind.

"I thinks, therefor we are"

I thank you for your work and I hope you will adopt and spread your alter egos work of "Any Body Can Do - Everything For Good" as well.

Love,

Tejinder Singh

Thank you very much for your kind remarks. In the coming days I will see the links you mention.

You mentioned children on the one hand, and extrapolation to humankind. I am sure you will agree these children love each other at heart, and will grow into compassionate siblings. I would say infants are aware of the timeless consciousness very directly, and live in the here and now - a capability which begins to falter as the mind grows and starts to remember and think. By the time they become teenagers, the thought clutter is already very high - add to it the lack of maturity that adults acquire. I think teenagers very much need spiritual training [strictly secular, and to be distinguished from fanatical/fundamentalist teaching associated with preaching this or that religion], along with their ongoing school training.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

Turil Cronburg

Sridattadev, I looked at your link about the levels of consciousness, and had a hard time understanding what you might be implying. My own work on developmental theory has pointed to a simple binary growth map (0, 1, 10, 11, 100, etc) of expanding awareness of first, second, third, and eventually (if lucky) fourth person perspective, for inputs and outputs (what I want to take into myself, and what I want to express out from myself). It seems too simple, perhaps, but everything I've seen, evidenice-wise, has been well described by this general pattern of consciousness, and how the human brain grows in it's ability to think about the self and others in our four dimensional reality (that we're aware of). If you want to see some more about this theory, you can see some of it at http://www.thewiseturtle.com . The way we help minds grow healthfully is to support their basic needs (see: Maslow) so that their bodies, and the brains that are part of those bodies, are able to function at peak performance, with effective multi-person goal-oriented thinking.

Also, note that the binary growth idea can be seen in the I Ching, which was kind of a surprise to me!

sridattadev kancharla

Dear Dr. Tejinder,

Thank you for reading my notes. I was just giving an analogy of my children when they fight they forget that they are brothers, yes indeed they love each other very much when they are not fighting for toys or some resource or some argument they start. We are like that grown up children fighting for resources on this planet and not realizing the plentitude of what the universe has to offer. Human kind is still in its teenage of growth and it needs direction to mature into a self sustaining, long lasting civilization. There comes along people on this planet who would consciously mature to the extent they do not hesitate to lay down their lives for teaching others the true way of life. We need to join more people in to this system of learning the truth about infinite nature of our self and that this life is just one of many in this timeless journey and then we can have a paradise on earth for all those who will ever visit here.

Love,

sridattadev kancharla

Dear Turil,

I concur with your ideology of fulfilling the basic needs of a being before ascending the conscious ladder. I was merely mentioning what levels of consciousness exists and that a being needs to learn to maintain the consciousness level once reaching a higher state. We have several examples of humans faltering and slipping back to lower levels of conscious being. There seem to be a natural tendency in built in our kind to falter back to lower levels of consciousness and forget our true nature. The system of media, government, education, some fundamentalist religious dogmas are also contributing to our global consciousness to fall back. As Dr. Tejinder said, we need to sow the seeds of universal consciousness in our kids and youngsters, so that by the time they reach adulthood they can build a better society than the one that we are currently in.

Love,

MIROSLAW KOZLOWSKI

Dear Professor Tejinder Pal

Your Essay is written beatifully. But in effect do not contains any new idea for physicist educated in West unuversities. As an example I can citate the book by Brian Leftow "Time and Eternity" CUP , 1991 ( Sic!)( 400 pages) devoted to the study of time, space and consciousness with the statement consciousness is not in time or space

Regards

Miroslaw Kozlowski

Tejinder Singh

Dear Prof. Kozlowski,

Thank you for your comments. I agree with you fully that the idea `consciousness is not in time and space' is not new [I wonder though why you made specific reference to Western physicists]. If I can get hold of the the book you mention, I will definitely see it, but perhaps you will agree that this view of consciousness has been more than once realized, discovered and propagated by great spiritual teachers over many past centuries.

Neither of course can I claim originality for the idea that attaining access to the conscious state , even if temporarily, makes the mind happier and more peaceful.

I suppose the new thing being said in the essay, in the present context of the question `How should humanity steer the future' is that humankind should attempt to convert such seeking into a global mass movement. I have attempted to make a case that doing this is more important than making this or that scientific or technological advance, as this effectively impacts positively on everything else that we are trying to do as a race to steer towards a better future.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

Turil Cronburg

In my experience, I believe that this level of thinking is a natural process that I call 4th person perspective, which happens around age 40 in humans, where the brain finally hits the stage of development where the ability for both sides of the prefrontal cortex are able to function independently. There's very little neurological work going on right now about this, since most folks have attached to the belief that the brain can't change after young adulthood, but I've seen a little movement here and there. (Sorry, I don't have a link to a citation at the moment. I read about the studies in Barbara Strauch's The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain.)

The idea is that at this stage of development, IF our bodies are well cared for (meeting the basic physiological and social needs in Maslow's "deficiency needs"), then our brains are able to consider current states as compared to long term goals, in all four of the time~space dimensions we're aware of. That allows us to more FULLY experience ourselves in our world. Those who get to this stage but haven't yet found a more wise/full/enlightened ability for thinking are clearly lacking some of those basic needs to keep their brain/body healthy and functioning at peak performance.

So the solution is to start focusing our resources on taking the best care of ourselves as possible. Anything else is wasteful and causing illness, physical and mental. We've been brainwashed to throw our resources at some bizarre distractions, but I see that people are waking up and seeing how insane this has been, and starting to look at what really is important and seeking ways to use whatever we've got to take better care of ourselves, so that we really can thrive, grow, and expand, dimensionally, in wisdom, awareness, creativity, and curiosity.

Turil Cronburg

Also, I saw your comment in the end of your essay about Descartes, and it always frustrates me to see people interpret his statement Cogito ergo sum! He wasn't at all, not in the least, saying that thinking is what makes us real/existing! Instead he was saying that the only proof of anything in reality is that that SOMETHING exists because he is able to experience. Thinking being his term for experiencing things. We can't prove anything beyond that, since our experiences might be inaccurate. But the fact that we do experience things means that SOMETHING must exist, and that we CAN prove. If it helps you understand what he was really talking about, imagine that the world "cogito" means patterns of energy, as opposed to totally static things, or total emptiness. Cogito is all about information, change, somethingness, which is what you're talking about in your paper. So, really, you are saying much of the same thing as Descartes, even if you don't realize it. :-)

Tejinder Singh

Hello, and many thanks for your incisive observations. I attempt to reply to your various points:

I hope I will be able to find the book you refer, and look up the very interesting discussion you cite on brain development around age forty. It would be interesting to see though, if they have something direct to say about how these changes relate to realizing a thoughtless consciousness. The way i have understood it, the thinking mind may be associated with the underlying brain. However, when thinking can be stilled, the conscious self-awareness that can be realized is a `whole body' plus `mind' process. The conscious I is a self-aware state not confined to the brain / mind, but a perception felt by the whole body.

Regarding what you say in your second paragraph, I had a remark. For people reaching forty, even if social and physiological needs are met, and they are in a state of readiness to be enlightened, there still could be lot of thought noise, isn't it? I think they need a trigger or jolt, say in the form of spiritual education, to make them see and achieve this better state of a controlled mind.

I fully agree with what you say in your third paragraph.

Regarding interpreting Descartes, I have no quarrels :-) I do know and agree that `cogito ergo sum' has been interpreted variously, and debated over by philosophers whether it is even correct as an assertion. So if by `think' you mean `am conscious' ...so that we can say `I am conscious, therefore I am'...then yes its the interpretation put forth in the essay. I was using the commonplace interpretation [which you debate] to distinguish the thinking mind from the conscious I.

Turil Cronburg

My own work suggests that the stage that we (if we're lucky) reach at around 40 is literally the ability to think 4 dimensionally, meaning that we have a 3D self awareness that we can step beyond, and turn around to look at. This is what you describe as "a `whole body' plus `mind' process", as far as I can tell. If you look at a tetrahedron, you can see the first three points (of view) fully and completely from the forth point, meaning that it feels like we've got the ability to step outside ourselves, in a sense, at least compared to what it was like before! And while the culture and language of "enlightenment" certainly only comes to some folks at this stage of development, the biological function seems to come to all humans who have the basic physical needs met to have it happen. They just don't think of it as so exceptional or worthy of mentioning, perhaps. Though we do have the very common idea (mentioned in The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain) of wisdom, which most folks notice appearing around middle age. (Which is what neurology shows as that new ability to use both sides of the pre-frontal cortex in parallel, adding to the two more "primitive" functions of the physical lizard-brain/brain-stem, and the emotional-brain/amygdala. Giving the brain, literally, four dimensions of thinking at the same time.)

Tejinder Singh

Thank you Turil, for this interesting insight.

Best,

Tejinder

Eckard Blumschein

Dear Tejinder,

The title of your essay uses the notion enlighten in sense that differs from use in Western philosophy. Did the Age of enlightenment enlighten those who believe in Buddha? Perhaps not.

While I fully agree with the first sentences of your essay, I doubt that e.g. war is just a consequence of unproductive thinking and harmful negative emotions. Alan Kadin dared to address a taboo question that is pretty new and is not answered by religions: While the resources are definitely limited, there is not yet a limitation to birth rate. On the contrary, the larger the number of believers, the stronger is a religious community against others. The bible demands: Be fertile and get more.

Do you expect healing just by means of meditation groups of men like those six who recently in India were sentenced to death for brutally violated to death a young woman? I rather prefer Alfred Nobe's legacy, methods of birth planing, and Bismarck's social care that provided individuals with a pension replacing the necessity to have as many children as possible.

Regards,

Eckard

Tejinder Singh

Dear Eckard,

Thank you for your remarks.

I agree that I talk of enlightenment in the limited sense as outlined in the essay, and this differs from enlightenment as in the Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason. It would seem to me that enlightenment in the sense I talk of it, would greatly enhance the cause espoused in the `Age of Enlightenment', but the other way round does not seem feasible, for one needs to go beyond reason to realize the conscious enlightened state.

Limiting birth rate, given limited resources, is a very significant concept, I readily agree - indeed I overlooked mentioning it in my essay.

As for war, I am inclined to believe that those in power who declare war have somewhere in their minds some anger, hatred, greed [power lust] or fear.

Criminals must face punishment. But while they serve out their sentence, they can be reformed by spiritual education - yes I do believe in this :-) Also, I have tried to advocate the need for such education as a mass movement, which in the very long run will hopefully reduce crime. The specific example that you cite, of the brutal death of a young Indian woman at the hand of criminals, I believe has its roots in the depraved manner in which India often treats its women, which again has its roots in poverty, lack of education, and sickening orthodoxy and gender inequality. These root problems have to be addressed, and I have tried making a case in the essay what might help.

Thank you again, for reading my essay.

Kind regards,

Tejinder

Georgina Woodward

Hi Tejinder,

I really like the idea of introducing mindfulness classes to schools. Learning how to quieten the mind and cope with stress are life skills. I have read of the many health benefits that arise from reducing stress. 'Tools' such as meditation, relaxation techniques and yoga or Tai chi can all be used. Extending the opportunity to the workplace is also a good idea although I do not know how many would like to participate. If it is seen as a waste of time, when there are more urgent tasks to deal with, making it mandatory might well cause more stress rather than less. I have heard the saying though -'The time to relax is when you don't have time to'. .

A well written, easy to read essay with a very nice message. Let's hope. Georgina

Tejinder Singh

Many thanks Georgina, for your encouraging comments. Yes it will be very fruitful indeed to introduce such practical teaching at high school and college levels. OK I agree it could be trickier to implement it as a `classroom session' in the workplace. But perhaps some form of collective counseling / orientation advice on inter-personal relations and stress/ availability of meditation rooms for optional use, could be helpful. I do feel something badly needs to be done about the office atmosphere in general, where more often than not, the goal is productivity and achievement and competition, and scant attention is paid to the mental well-being of the employees.

Kind regards,

Tejinder