THE second half of the twentieth century witnessed a meteoric rise in technological growth such as has never happened before. It is now a cliché to say that there are as many scientists alive today as there were in the last 2,500 years. But nowadays humanity is facing unsolvable problems and some look for ancient solutions to these modern problems. The revival of interest in ancient cultures is a recent phenomenon, including interest in Carlos Castañeda on teachings from ancient Mexico, research into the secrets of the pyramids and work on Mayan and Incan civilizations.

One of the ancient cultures is the so-called Indic or Vedic. Today, the Upanishad-s are accessible to everybody, and they pose very interesting questions. One of them is: 'What is it that knowing which everything comes to be known?' The answer of the guru is: Knowledge is of two types: parâ and aparâ (supreme knowledge and lower knowledge). The lower knowledge includes the Veda-s, Vedânga-s, and Upanishad-s! The highest knowledge is Self-realization.

Then comes the problem: Why is it that in spite of the scriptures and philosophies telling us that we are not what we appear to be, and that what we see is fleeting-only an empirical reality-we are not able to realize the transcendental reality within us? To everyone who went to Ramana Maharshi with a question, he responded with another question: 'Who are you?' Who are we? Our bio-data only records the name, age, sex, address, height, weight, colour of the eyes, and so forth. Otherwise we are nobody!

The answer is given in the Katha Upanishad: The human body has a defect: the five organs of knowledge are always turned outwards, and hence the human being is attracted to the external world. Only the wise are bold enough to shut these organs of knowledge, to look inward and find the inner reality. That is the distinction between ancient philosophy and modern science.

Modern science looks out to understand the universe. The ancient wisdom says: Yes, we are also interested in the world around us, as it has an empirical reality; we have to live in it. But there is a greater, transcendental reality that can be understood only when we look inward. Spirituality is the goal of ancient philosophy.

Unlike western philosophers, the yogis of ancient India say there is nothing else to be done. When a son asks his father: 'I want to know all about Brahman; will you teach me?', the father does not give a long lecture. He simply says: 'What is that out of which the whole universe has come, in which it inheres, into which it dissolves? That is Brahman.' And what is the son supposed to do? Meditate. Then he discovers, layer by layer, the truth.

A scriptural story is told by Sri Ramakrishna: The sage ªuka, dissatisfied with the knowledge he had, said to his father Vyâsa: 'I wish to reach the highest wisdom.' The father answered: 'Go to King Janaka', which he did. Janaka said: 'Pay my fee', although guru-dakshinâ (the teacher's due) is paid after instruction is given. So ªuka asked: 'Why now?' Janaka responded: 'After I impart you the instruction, you and I will be one, and you won't pay me the fee.' Knowledge is within us; it has only to be uncovered.

On the other hand, no scientist dares ever say that science has reached the end of its journey. As a young man, Max Planck wanted to work in the field of physics. His professor said: 'Physics? Physics is dead; there is nothing more to be done. Take up engineering, where the money lies.' The young student persevered, and opened the floodgates by his Quantum theory.

There is always a feeling that science should go forward. One hundred years after Kepler, Stephen Hawking is now saying: 'I think physics is slowly coming towards its end.' And the quip is: Yes, physics is coming to an end, because it does not know where to go from here. There are more questions than answers.

Einstein said that Sir Isaac Newton has always been the brightest jewel in the field of science. Newton gave us a comprehensive picture of the universe that obeys natural laws. But none of us actually perceives reality the way it is. This is a point that never occurred to Newton. Today, physicists are thinking about it. It is through the filter of the mind that we receive impressions from the external world. The way I look at the world is not the way you do, because our mental processes are different. But does the universe have an existence per se? Does it exist by itself? This is a deep philosophical problem that has never been solved. For Newton said the external world is real; it remains real during the time of observation; the observer does not influence it. The mathematical equations depict a model, which is being repeatedly polished and corrected. But Newton created confidence about understanding the universe, and was followed by a galaxy of mathematicians, because mathematics was required to understand the external world.

One of the greatest charismatic figures of the eighteenth century was Pierre Raymond de La Place, a member of the French Academy of Sciences who wrote a book on celestial mechanics, which he dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte. The Emperor told the author: 'Your book says a lot about creation, but there is no mention of the Creator!' Until that time every book on science had to mention the name of God. Newton wrote in his Principia Mathematica: 'I am making an attempt to describe the wonder of God's creation.' But La Place said: 'I don't need that hypothesis', for creation is like a clockwork that goes on ticking smoothly, and all we need to do is to work out how the clock is ticking. Who started the clock ticking is none of our business. That was the cleavage between the philosophical and scientific ways of looking at Nature; scientists started becoming agnostics, and later atheists.

But within one hundred years, a blow was struck. Newton's laws of motion were bi-directional in time: you can go forward or backward. Then came the laws of thermo dynamics which claimed that you can go back in time as far as Newton is concerned, but the world never goes back in time. Your thought process can go back in time, but the world is ticking away in a single direction.

The next revolution that came about was in the nineteenth century with James Clarke Maxwell, and this was followed rapidly by other revolutionary discoveries. Very quickly a generation gap developed between Einstein and younger scientists. One of them said: Light sometimes behaves like matter, sometimes like a wave. Schrödinger came on the scene and said: It is all waves-a set of waves; it is only when you look at it that it congeals into matter. Research into the subatomic world was supported by the most sophisticated mathematics. When Heisenberg came across the fact of an uncertainty principle, which questions the very existence of the law of causality, he did not sleep for three nights because he realized the consequences. He wrote to his professor, Niels Bohr: 'What shall I do?' Niels Bohr said: 'Publish or perish.'

Schrödinger's theory amounted to saying: 'We are all mathematical waves. It is only when the observer comes into the picture that the phenomenon automatically falls into place. If I close my eyes, all of you are waves of possibilities. If I open my eyes, all of you are solidified. In order to see whether this was true, a thought experiment was generated-the famous 'double-click experiment'-and it was demonstrated once and for all that a subatomic particle, like an electron or even a photon, behaves like a wave when it is not being observed, and like a particle when observed. Many jokes have been made about it: The electron is a particle on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a wave on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and Sunday is a holiday. Another one: All subatomic particles are like school children. When the teacher is present, they behave properly; when she is absent, they run helter-skelter, like waves. There was intense debate after Schrödinger revolutionized our way of thinking, which made him remark: 'Had I known what would come out of my research, I would not have touched the subject.'

Many experiments have since been performed all over the world, including psychic experiments. Slowly, physics is gathering into its fold parapsychology also. As Hamlet said to Horatio: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' It was only in 1981 and '82 that a team of three scientists in Paris demonstrated once and for all that Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics: the observer is always a part of the observation.

Bishop Berkeley's famous problem poses a very interesting situation: 'In a distant forest, during a thunderstorm, lightning strikes a tree. As the tree falls to the ground, does it make a noise if there is nobody to hear it?' This is very difficult to answer. Does the phenomenon occur at all in the absence of an observer? Does the universe have an absolute reality? Later Bishop Berkeley answered the question in his own way: 'There is always one observer. Why do you think it has to be a human observer?' Consciousness is the observer and influences the phenomenon. John von Neumann stated: 'When I close my eyes, the whole world is a wave of possibilities; when I open my eyes, consciousness collapses these waves of possibilities into reality.'

The ancient Wisdom, however, did not give importance to cognition, but to the cognizer. The perceiver being given a lot of attention, perception and the object of perception became secondary. But the perceiver that Vedânta speaks of is Âtman or Brahman, whereas for a scientist it is the mind or intelligence of the observer.

The Katha Upanishad defines 'consciousness': 'That which cannot be seen by the eyes, but because of which the eyes are able to see; that which cannot be heard by the ears, but because of which the ears are able to hear; that which cannot be thought of by the mind, but because of which the mind is able to think.' If the mind is the observer in an experiment and influences the observation or the result, the mind itself is participating; and that which gives power to the mind is the super-consciousness. It is in the light of the super-consciousness that the individual consciousness is able to perceive. So what the physicists are talking about is one aspect of the phenomenon, while the Vedântin-s are talking about another. What needs to be done in the twenty first century is to link them.

One cannot distinguish between two electrons except by the so-called 'spin property'. Let us assume that there are two electrons side by side with the same spin-positive or negative. Then one starts moving to the right and the other to the left. Suppose I interfere and change the spin of the electron on the right. What happens to the electron on the left? Common sense says: It will go merrily on its way. Quantum mechanics says: If you influence one, the other is also influenced. In order to test this, time intervals of the order of nanoseconds had to be measured, which was possible in the 1980s because of the space and atomic energy programmes and the developments in computer technology.

When two photons or light particles with the same spin or polarization go, one to the right and the other to the left, after they have travelled five or ten metres apart, the time taken by light to go from the right to the left is forty nano seconds. But the experiment showed that if the polarization of the photon on the right is changed, the other one changes in ten nano seconds. No signal has travelled; almost as if by instinct, the second photon realizes that the first photon has changed. This experiment has been repeated all over the world.

Niels Bohr said that the whole universe is interconnected. When you interfere with one part of the universe, the message goes immediately to the entire universe. But we do not know how. Twentieth century physics has been asking questions about this, and the answer is very simple: 'I don't know.' We just do not know what is happening. The most exasperating statement in this connection was that of John Webb, a famous mathematician: There appears to be a conspiracy on the part of Nature not to reveal her secrets. To quote Niels Bohr again: The job of quantum mechanics is not to understand Nature, but to describe it.

La Place said: Suppose there is a super intelligence to which all the information about the initial conditions of all objects in the universe were given, by the help of Newton's laws of motion, it would be able to predict for ever and for ever the future motions of all these objects. Nature would have been understood. But the twentieth century man says: 'The job of physics is not to understand Nature, but to describe it.' No wonder today most people are puzzled and one of them even used the word 'mâyâ': the whole universe is a mirage; it is unreal. ªankarâchârya's philosophy points out that the world has empirical reality, but from the transcendental plane the empirical reality is unreal; from the empirical plane, the world is real. When one is hungry, one must go to the kitchen and have a meal. No one can say this is all fleeting, so let me not have dinner.

Physics is the most materialistic of all sciences. Biology deals with life, psychology with the mind, but in physics, none of these has a place. In physics, there is a cold-blooded analysis of inanimate matter. But now people are asking: Does the electron have consciousness?

That is the reason why the Upanishad-s have suddenly attracted a lot of attention. Far behind all the things that are apparent to us, that are seen on the outside, is the deep mystery of the universe and the external world. And it appears almost as if the secrets of the external universe lie within, and not outside.

So in order to meditate successfully, we must be convinced that it is a powerful.