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IS AKASHA REAL?

THE USE OF the word “Akasha” has lingered around the fringes of physics for at least a century. The reason for this is that an ancient and supposedly outmoded belief refuses to die—the belief that empty space is not empty at all. Akasha, the Sanskrit word for space, has an English equivalent: the ether. Up until a few generations ago, if you had gone to school and asked what filled the infinite void between the stars, you would have been told, whether in ancient Greece or medieval France or Harvard at the time of Abraham Lincoln, that pure emptiness isn’t possible. An invisible ether that can’t be seen or measured allows light to travel from the stars, as water allows ripples to spread when a rock is thrown into a pond. Without a medium to pass through, light waves have no way to move from point A to point B.

The ether suffered a decisive setback in the 1880s when two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, proved that light traveled at the same speed no matter what direction it moved in. This was important because the so-called “ether wind” that was thought to sweep energy through the universe should have made light travel slower going upstream than downstream. When Michelson and Morley proved that this wasn’t true, even Einstein became convinced that space was a void without activity, a belief that was also wrong, as it turns out. Physicists now believe that space is full of activity in the form of invisible fluctuations in the quantum field. These so-called virtual fluctuations account for matter and energy and also for distortions in time and space. Thus, in a curious way the disproved notion of the ether has been revived indirectly.

To find out where matter and energy come from, physics wound up positing a universal field that envelops not just what we observe but everything that could possibly exist. Modern physics finds it easy to make the material world disappear into nothingness, but that is deeply disturbing, almost as disturbing as the disappearance of a dying person. Here is how the disappearing act of a rock, tree, planet, or galaxy works:

First, the rock, tree, or planet disappeared from sight when scientists realized that solid matter is made up of atoms that cannot be detected by the naked eye.

Second, atoms disappeared when it was discovered that they are made up of energy, mere vibrations in the void.

Finally, energy disappeared when it was found that vibrations are temporary excitations in a field, and that the field itself doesn’t vibrate but maintains a flat, constant “zero point.”

Theoretically, to reach the zero point in Nature one could cool empty space down to absolute zero, and instantly everything would cease to vibrate. Yet the zero point also exists here and now—it provides the starting point from which everything in the universe springs. Since matter and energy are constantly emerging and then vanishing back into the void, the zero point serves as the switching station between existence and nothingness. Newton had established that matter and energy cannot be destroyed, but they can oscillate in this shadowy way at the subatomic level, as long as the sum total of matter and energy isn’t altered.

The Zero Point Field

It wouldn’t be so disturbing if this vanishing act was due to occur only when the cosmos dies billions of years from now by cooling down to absolute zero. Nor would it be so disturbing if matter only collapsed into the void theoretically. Such isn’t the case, however. Matter and energy have to disappear. If they remained stable, which is how rocks, trees, and planets look to the eye, chaos would break loose. Matter would exist only as randomly floating particles in interstellar space. Exploded bits of the Big Bang would be flying apart at millions of miles an hour without any relationship to one another. There would be no forms, no evolution, no organization—in other words, no universe as we know it. At best, gravity could possibly pull together larger clumps of matter, but gravity is also a wave function that fluctuates around the zero point.

The fact that chaos doesn’t totally dominate remains a huge mystery, which may only be solved by Akasha. Here the needs of physics and the Vedic rishis begin to converge in startling ways. The rishis were focused on consciousness as a universal principle. But to have a thinking universe, they needed to explain how the cosmic mind works, how it holds itself together and organizes itself into thoughts. If the “mind field” was totally stable, it would be a dead zone, or at best filled with a constant, meaningless buzz. Physics also needs to know how the universe holds itself together and organizes into coherent forms. Otherwise, the inconceivable fireball that appeared at the instant of the Big Bang would have blown itself apart, the way dynamite blows itself apart, without bothering to create forms along the way.

Physics was drawn, step-by-step, into the void because nothing in the visible world was adequate to explain what had to be explained. The zero point became an all-inclusive “field of fields” that encompasses every unseen, or virtual, particle in the universe. It was calculated that the zero point contained 10 to the 40th power more energy than the visible universe—that is, a one followed by forty zeros. The void turned out to be a seething exchange of energy, not just between photons and electrons but in every conceivable quantum event. Suddenly the unseen has become incredibly more powerful than the seen. But in what way is the “field of fields” like a mind, the thing the rishis were looking for?

Thinking, the basic operation of the mind, organizes reality to make sense. The universe does this physically. It forms complex systems. DNA is one example, but genes didn’t create life simply by stringing simple molecules along a double helix. There are spaces between each genetic bit, and this sequencing is all-important. An amoeba differs from a human being in the sequence of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen along its genes, not in the atoms themselves. The fact that empty spaces, or gaps, between genetic material are so important brings us back to the void, where something is arranging random events so that they are meaningful.

Once a form has been created, it has to be remembered in order to stay together. The universe remembers what it has created and meshes it with older systems. The Earth’s ecosystem is a good example. Life-forms constantly relate to each other in exquisite balance. The oxygen given off by plants during photosynthesis, for example, would eventually poison the entire atmosphere, killing off all vegetation that needs carbon dioxide, were it not for the evolution of animals, which consume the oxygen and return carbon dioxide back to plants. This extremely complex balance can be traced back to the void, where every single fluctuation of virtual energy is passed along and absorbed by a virtual particle in need of energy. (As one popular writer has put it, it’s as if the cosmos were passing along a penny, so that every time one particle is a penny poorer, another gets a penny richer.) The basic pattern is very simple, but when trillions of energy exchanges are involved every second, as they are with life on Earth, the ecosystem’s ability to keep one form separate from another, yet in dynamic relationship, is mind-boggling.

There are other things the mind can do that are paralleled in the universe. The mind can keep track of two events separated in time—this is how we recognize a face today that we saw years ago, for example. Similarly, the universe keeps track of any two paired electrons. They will be paired for all time even if they travel millions of light-years apart. Uncannily, if one of the paired electrons should change in position or spin, its twin will change simultaneously without sending a signal that needs to travel through space. The Zero Point Field communicates without regard for time, distance, or the speed of light.

The very fact that we use a word like “communicate” indicates how hard it is not to see parallels between our minds and Nature “out there.” Which brings us to a dangerous trap. Mind and matter offer two ways of describing the same thing, but they are not, in themselves, exactly the same. If one could show that the universe has a memory, for example, that wouldn’t prove it had a mind. Remembering a face is a mental act. The ability of two electrons to match each other’s spin across a vast distance is a material feat. The same trap works in reverse. If one could calculate every vibration of a violinist’s bow while playing a Beethoven sonata, that wouldn’t explain music or its beauty. Those are mental phenomena, not material ones. All we can do is draw parallels between two models in an effort to place them in one reality.

I’ve been speaking as if the universe consciously knows what it is doing when DNA creates an amoeba, for example, instead of a chimpanzee or a human being. This implies self-awareness on the part of molecules, and that in turn requires the Zero Point Field to act like a mind as it organizes every possible fluctuation in the cosmos. No matter how closely one draws the parallels, this premise can’t be proven—or disproven—because the Zero Point Field, by containing everything, contains us. We cannot step outside it, and so we are in the same position as a fish trying to prove that the ocean is wet. Unless the fish jumps out of the ocean, water is everywhere; there is no contrast, and therefore no dryness that makes wetness possible.

We cannot prove that the universe has a mind, because we aren’t mindless. Nobody has ever experienced mindlessness; therefore, we have nothing to base it on. The Vedic rishis were fortunate that they started out believing that consciousness was real and needed no proof. Physics doesn’t hold that consciousness is a given. To speak of a self-aware universe puts one at the fringes of speculative thinking in physics. But for our purposes in looking for evidence of the afterlife, it is vital to show that consciousness is everywhere, because then there would be nowhere to go after we die that isn’t conscious.

Mind over Matter

What if our minds could alter the quantum field? Then we would have a link between the two models, mind and matter. Such a link was actually provided by Helmut Schmidt, a researcher working for the Boeing aerospace laboratory in Seattle. Beginning in the mid-Sixties, Schmidt set up machines that could emit random signals, with the aim of seeing if ordinary people could alter those signals using nothing more than their minds. The first machine detected radioactive decay from strontium 90; each electron that was given off lit up either a red, blue, yellow, or green light. Schmidt asked ordinary people to predict, with the press of a button, which light would be illuminated next.

At first no one performed better than random, or 25%, in picking one of the four lights. Then Schmidt hit on the idea of using expert psychics as his subjects, and his first results were encouraging: psychics guessed the correct light 27% of the time. But he didn’t know if this was a matter of clairvoyance—seeing the result before it happened—or something more active, actually changing the random pattern of electrons being emitted.

So Schmidt built a second machine that generated only two signals, call them plus and minus. A circle of lights was set up, and each time a plus or a minus was generated, a bulb would light up. If two pluses were generated consecutively, the lights would go on in a clockwise direction. Two minuses would light up in a counterclockwise direction. Left to itself, the machine would light up an equal number of pluses and minuses; what Schmidt wanted his subjects to do was to will the lights to move clockwise only. He eventually found two subjects who had remarkable success. One could get the lights to move clockwise 52.5% of the time. An increase of 2.5% over randomness doesn’t sound dramatic, but Schmidt calculated that the odds were 10 million to 1 against this occurring by chance. The other subject was just as successful, but oddly enough, his efforts to make the lights move clockwise had the opposite result: they moved only counterclockwise. Later experiments with new subjects raised the success rate to 54%, although the strange anomaly that the lights would sometimes go in the wrong direction persisted. (No explanation was ever found for this.) Schmidt showed that an observer can change activity in the quantum field using the mind alone, which supports the case that at some deep level mind and matter are one. The rishis’ assertion that we are embedded in the Akashic field seems more credible, which also makes it more credible that we do not leave the field when we die; if we did, we would be the only thing in Nature that isn’t part of the field.

Inspired by Schmidt’s results, a Princeton engineering professor named Robert Jahn developed much more sophisticated trials, involving a machine that could generate zeros and ones five times a second. In the Princeton experiments, each participant went through three types of tests. First he would will the machine to produce more ones than zeros, then more zeros than ones, and finally he would try not to influence the machine at all. Each test was repeated until there were between 500,000 and 1 million results, a staggering number that in a single day outstripped all the previous trials performed by Schmidt and all the other parapsychologists before him.

After twelve years of study, it was found that roughly two-thirds of ordinary people could influence the outcome of the machine, unlike in Schmidt’s study. These ordinary people, like his psychics, could will material changes, evoking more zeros than ones, more ones than zeros, about 51 to 52% of the time. This again may seem like a slim margin, but it turns out to defy chance by a ratio of a trillion to one. The solidity of the outcome is particularly radical because random chance is a bedrock of quantum physics, Darwinian evolution, and many other fields. (A dozen related follow-up studies also came up with results in the 51–52% range.)

If we accept that our minds are embedded in the quantum field and can change it, where does that leave us? We could be influencing the field a little bit—no more than a matter of slight coincidences, such as thinking of a friend’s name and having that friend suddenly call on the phone—or at the other extreme, perhaps everything we call reality is manifested by consciousness, coaxed out of the field by intention. After examining this research in detail in her excellent book The Field, Lynne McTaggart sees the possibility of a complete revolution in consciousness theory: “On the most profound level, the [Princeton] studies also suggest that reality is created by each of us only by our attention. At the lowest level of mind and matter, each of us creates the world.”

Jahn and his colleagues remained resolutely technical, however. They were baffled by their results, because if ordinary people could influence a machine, which part of the complicated machinery did they affect? Would we have to say that the mind actually changes the rate at which electrons are emitted? Just as important is the question, “So what?” If an ordinary person can make a machine generate more zeros than ones, does that really impact the big issues in science? In fact it does, in profound ways.

Does Akasha Explain Everything?

Akasha can be interpreted as the field through which the mind operates. Ervin Laszlo, a prominent Hungarian theorist on science and consciousness, has taken the bold step of introducing Akasha as the unifying answer to everything. After forty years of delving into cutting-edge theories in philosophy, biology, cybernetics, and physics, Laszlo found himself embracing the antiquated and discredited idea we discussed earlier: the ether. Physics had proven that light, unlike waves rippling across a pond, doesn’t need a medium to travel in. When a photon starts at point A and moves to point B, the journey can be accomplished by the vanishing act discussed earlier: the first photon winks out of existence, changes its location somewhere in virtual reality (the Zero Point Field), and reappears intact in the second location. It doesn’t slow down due to friction the way a rock skipping over the water’s surface does. Moreover, in the instant that it is gone, the photon can “speak” to every other photon in the universe, coordinating its activity with every form in creation. I’m giving the scenario without any technical jargon in order to describe why physics threw out the ether—it simply wasn’t needed in quantum calculations, not for half a century or more, during which time physics made enormous progress.

Then, according to Laszlo and other systems analysts, physics hit a wall. It couldn’t explain how the universe managed to be so precisely coordinated. When matter and energy disappear into virtual reality, as they do thousands of times per second, things happen out of sight in some uncanny way. Time gets regulated; objects in space communicate their position, and seemingly random matter stays in touch with them. The Big Bang, which contained so much energy in a space millions of times smaller than an atom that billions of galaxies still express only 4% of it, occurred within a tiny window of possibility. If the expanding universe, moving at millions of miles per minute, had been off by a fraction of a second, the formation of stars and galaxies would have been impossible, because the momentum of the explosion would have exceeded the ability of gravity, the weakest force in nature, to halt it. Only the most delicate balancing act kept the push-pull of two forces so close together that they can dance together instead of tearing each other apart.

Randomness is a feeble explanation for such precision, Laszlo claims. (In the Princeton experiments, anyone who relied on randomness would be right only one in a trillion times.) Something so precisely organized requires a principle to hold it together and a medium to carry information from one end of creation to the other. The old notion of the ether doesn’t suffice, but Akasha does. In his 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field, Laszlo explains that Akasha is necessary, not as a medium for visible light but as a medium for invisible light, and invisible energy in general. Think of a jump rope nailed at one end to a wall. As the jump rope is turning, which stands for vibrating energy, follow the rope closer and closer to the wall. Every fiber now vibrates in a smaller and smaller range, until you reach the end point where the rope is nailed. That point isn’t moving at all; it is the zero point, the beginning and end of energy. Zero isn’t satisfactory, however, since quantum calculations already show that empty space is packed with infinite amounts of virtual energy, more per square centimeter than inside a star.

So think again about the point where the jump rope meets the wall. If you put a super-sensitive stethoscope to the wall, the rope’s vibration is shaking the whole wall, and in return the wall is sending some of that vibration back out again. This, according to Laszlo, is also happening at the zero point. Every vibration is sending signals throughout the field, and in return the field is sending signals back. The universe, it turns out, is constantly monitoring itself by somehow coordinating every vibration that occurs anywhere in the visible or invisible domain.

Imagine two photons floating through the vastness of interstellar space. By chance they collide with each other and bounce apart. Did anything happen that’s different from two grains of sand hitting each other as the surf crashes on the beach? Yes, Laszlo says: they exchange information and they begin to relate to each other. Systems theory, as summarized by Laszlo, helps to explain this interaction. When two particles touch, they are carrying information, and as they meet, they “speak” to each other: Here’s how fast I’m going, how much I weigh, where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

This conversation doesn’t happen in isolation. The field is listening in, and on hearing what’s happening, it stores the information for reference, since it needs every single bit to run the cosmos. “Bit” is a technical term in information theory, referring to a single mathematical unit—either zero or one—with which any kind of information can be expressed. When the two particles separate, their future is changed because of the information they just exchanged.

This exchange brings to mind the possibility that these photons know what they are doing. Most speculative thinkers, including Laszlo, can’t quite bring themselves to claim that the field is conscious; he speaks instead about “the roots of consciousness.” From a physicist’s standpoint, atoms don’t need to think, much less be alive. They meet, they interact, they separate. If complicated things happen, they may be mysterious, invisible, and fiendishly difficult to calculate, needing far more computing capacity than all the mainframe computers in the world. Still, as long as numbers explain how matter behaves, there is no need to drop something alien like consciousness into the equation.

Well and good, but leaving out mind doesn’t work, since you are leaving out yourself. Imagine that someone wanted to figure out the rules of football and had a silent videotape to work from. With no knowledge of the game, it would still be possible to watch enough plays and come to reliable conclusions about what’s going on. All you’d need to observe is the way the ball flies and how the players hit each other, or don’t. Every time the quarterback is knocked down with the ball still in his hands, for example, both teams line up to start a new play. Seeing this happen a few times would lead a scientist to conclude that the quarterback must either throw away the ball or run with it.

Yet it would be impossible to make sense of the game if you assumed that the players were mindless, inert objects. They are too coordinated, they form too many complex patterns, they repeat and remember those patterns, and the scoreboard makes sense—somebody wins, somebody loses. To go a step further, it would be a mistake to start your research by saying that football ipso facto cannot be based on the existence of mind or consciousness. You would wind up with wildly wrong conclusions if you insisted that no matter what the videotape shows, football cannot be a game; it must remain a random collision of objects.

In trying to figure out the apparently random activity in the quantum field, we’ve come to see that there is incredible timing, coordination, memory, information exchange, and self-interaction. But what is the point of it all? The observer effect adds the missing link. The observer effect is related to one of the cornerstones of quantum physics, called “complementarity,” which holds that it isn’t possible to know everything about a quantum event. When an observer looks at, or measures, an electron, whatever is being observed is limited. Each and every electron has a probability of appearing anywhere in the universe.

Only under observation does an electron jump from virtual reality into the visible universe, and as soon as the observer stops looking, it falls back into the field again. Erwin Schrödinger, the great German physicist, devised Schrödinger’s equation, one of the foundations of quantum theory, which precisely calculates what these probabilities are, and yet the notion that an electron is everywhere until an observer calls it into existence defies logic. For those readers who haven’t read about Schrödinger’s cat, a famous paradox that grows out of the observer effect, here it is:

A cat is placed in a closed box with a fatal device inside. The device will release poison cyanide gas if it is triggered, and the trigger is a bit of radioactive matter. If the radioactive matter releases a single electron, that will be enough to trigger the device, release the poison, and kill the cat.

Here is the paradox: according to quantum physics, an electron has no visible reality until it is observed. It occupies a “superposition,” meaning that it can be in more than one place at the same time (a fact that has been verified experimentally with subatomic particles that do in fact occupy multiple positions at once). Being in a closed box, the cat is outside the field of observation; it could be dead or alive, so according to quantum theory, it must be both. Only when the box is opened and the observer determines the situation will we know which state, dead or alive, has been decided upon. Until then, both must coexist.

Many physicists have escaped the paradox of a cat being dead and alive at the same time by pointing out that what is true on the micro level isn’t true on the macro level: superposition holds for electrons, not for everyday objects like cats. But this begs the question, since the observer effect is alive and well in the Schmidt and Princeton experiments, where the mere attention of an observer altered the quantum field and the material world at the same time. The crux of the paradox is that you cannot know any outcome in the quantum world until you observe it (i.e., it is impossible to know if Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive until you look, and the looking makes it one or the other).

Akasha solves this problem by making every event participatory at every level. All observers are inside the Akashic field, and whatever they do causes the whole field to respond. Therefore, we are not falsifying the universe to describe it as behaving like ourselves. The predictable and the unpredictable coexist. A cat can be dead and alive at the same time without shaking up how the world usually works. In fact, it is through the unpredictable universe that we know ourselves and vice versa. The Vedic rishis realized that time and eternity have to be related, and their conclusion was that time is an illusion while eternity is real. This turns the tables on the five senses, which must operate as if time is real, since every event we participate in occurs in spacetime. The rishis declare that dying allows us to see eternal reality clearly and to participate in it more fully. In Laszlo’s formation, the Akashic field does exactly the same for all matter, energy, and information. Their interactions in the visible universe are reflections of far more important invisible relationships taking place offstage.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine that you are a scientist who’s been assigned to measure the minuscule explosions of light that take place in a field; in this case, it’s the screen of a television set. These explosions take place on the atomic level, so as you move in close you are confronted with millions of photons firing in random patterns. You would describe the TV screen as a field undergoing random excitations, exactly as physicists describe the electromagnetic field. As you move farther out, however, the patches of red, green, and blue begin to cluster; they start to appear organized. Moving out still farther, you begin to notice vague shapes. You feel like an astronomer using a radio telescope to determine if the background noise of the cosmos might contain patterns. Patterns are mathematical, and it takes intelligence to use a mathematical code.

So you begin to come up with a mathematical explanation for the patterns seen on the TV screen. Moving farther and farther out, you eventually see that these patterns are actually pictures of human life, and that the random firing of photons had a purpose. This would be startling enough to cause you to revise your entire theory; you would have to suppose that randomness was an illusion covering a deeper reality, which is the picture. Only consciousness can fully explain the reason why the bursts of red, green, and blue are being emitted.

We find ourselves at the point where many explanations based on randomness no longer satisfy, and a shift must be made to a more conscious explanation. Why do photons fire in a television? Because they turn into a picture. Why do photons fire in the cosmos? For the same reason. Preceding quantum physics by centuries, the Vedic rishis said that time and space are projections on the blank screen of consciousness, the screen of Akasha.

In other words, when you got up this morning, drove to work, and spent your day at the office, nothing really happened as you experienced it. Time didn’t pass, nor did you move through space. This conclusion confounds common sense but is thoroughly accepted in physics. Let me explain. If you dream at night of flying to Paris and walking the streets, nothing of the sort actually happened; not only did you go nowhere physically, your brain didn’t even make pictures that correspond to Paris. The dream resulted from brain activity that can be broken down into bits of information: tiny electrical switches were either on or off, polarities of certain molecules were either positive or negative. Your whole dream and everything in it was just a zero or one game.

The same is true of the people we watch on television. A character may seem to live in a house and mow the lawn. But the house is actually a flat image on the screen, and the movements of people are just phosphors switching on and off. Again, a zero and one game. Nothing moves on a TV screen. If someone appears to run to the left, it’s only a pattern of signals that light up on the left and turn off on the right—the same as provided by blinking Christmas tree lights that seem to move around in a circle when in fact all that is happening is that the string of lights is going on and off in a pattern that makes it seem as if motion is occurring.

You move through time and space in the same way, as does the Earth in its orbit and the stars in the sky. Quantum impulses switch on and off, and a change of position occurs because energy gets excited a bit to the left or right from the last excitation. In reality not a single quark or photon changes position in spacetime. But doesn’t it amount to the same thing? If an object appears to move, why not say it moves? In fact, we can’t. The Earth appears to move around the sun, yet if that were really the case, it would eventually spiral into the sun and be destroyed. In fact, even though the Earth encounters friction in its orbit—in the form of interstellar dust and the solar wind—our planet never gets any closer to the sun or slows down. This is because every atom of Earth winks out of sight and comes back with the same energy and mass that it has always had. The zero point, it turns out, projects the Earth as surely as a television screen projects its pictures. (A skeptic would ask how anything changes if the Zero Point Field constantly replenishes the visible universe. That is a riddle, but its answer may lie in two factors: the slow decay of protons, which takes billions of years, and the expanding universe, which is carrying dispersion of energy, or entropy, as the original heat of the Big Bang becomes dissipated. But folding these two factors into quantum theory is far from being achieved.)

How does all this relate to the afterlife? Ask yourself a simple question. When you’re watching TV, which is more real, the picture you’re seeing or the station that’s sending the signal? Of course, the station is more real, the picture is only an image. Likewise, Laszlo says, the Zero Point Field—Akasha—is more real than the visible universe. Akasha organizes and coordinates all the projections we call time, space, matter, and energy. If this is correct, then we have established a foundation for several key assertions in Vedanta:

The material world is projected from a nonmaterial source.

The invisible world comes first. It contains the seeds of time and space.

Reality increases the closer one gets to the source.

To put it in human terms, we do not have to fear that death is a vanishing act because life has always been one. What we most value in ourselves, our capacity to think and feel, didn’t come about from entering the physical world. It got projected into the physical world from a source, the Zero Point Field, that is the root of consciousness, extending back billions of years and ahead into the foreseeable future. Far from being a religious vision, this model explains the universe better than any other, and gives us what the rishis and modern physicists both demand: a bridge between mind and matter.