So far, we have encountered two transcendental realms, that of Plato's cave allegory (see Section 1.4), and that of Goswami’s quantum theory within monistic idealism (see Chapter 7). Now we shall consider two other transcendental realms, one by the sage Nisargadatta Maharaj and one by the sage Ramesh Balsekar.
On p. 381 of I Am That (1984), Nisargadatta says,
"The memory of the past unfulfilled desires traps energy, which manifests itself as a person. When its charge gets exhausted, the person dies. Unfulfilled desires are carried over into the next birth. Self-identification with body creates ever-fresh desires and there is no end to them unless this mechanism of bondage is clearly seen. It is clarity that is liberating, for you cannot abandon desire unless its causes and effects are clearly seen. I do not say that the same person is reborn. It dies, and dies for good. But its memories remain and their desires and fears. They supply the energy for a new person."
Nisargadatta's concept has been reformulated by one of his students, Ramesh Balsekar, whose teaching will receive much emphasis in this course. Ramesh uses a concept of the source and sink for the manifestation that is similar to the other transcendental realms. He calls it the "pool of consciousness" and it implicitly contains all of the forms from which consciousness "selects" the components for an object of manifestation such as a body-mind organism (Ramesh Balsekar, Consciousness Writes, 1993, p. 78). At the death of the organism, the mental conditioning that was present in the organism, such as thoughts, fears, desires, aversions, and ambitions, return to the ocean where they become ingredients to be used by consciousness in creating new forms.
Because the basic feature of the transcendental realms is their wholeness and transcendence, the entire space-time realm is represented in them. Ramesh frequently refers to the destiny of every individual and of the world as being completely determined (we shall say more about this in Section 12.5). This is consistent with an abstract form of the entire space-time realm existing in the ocean of consciousness, just as it does in the other transcendental realms.
The manifestation contains only the space-time events that are observed at this moment. However, since the transcendental realms are characterized by wholeness, they contain the events of all space-time in implicit form. i.e., they contain all events in all time as well as in all space. As the sage Ramesh Balsekar says, "It is all there!" This feature is a possible explanation for nonlocality of the mind (see Section 5.2).
Nonlocality in time means that some nonlocal minds are sensitive to projections from the transcendental that include some aspects of past and/or future. This would explain those talented individuals that can read the "akashic records" and thus see past lives, or those that are precognitive and can see some aspects of the future. Nonlocality in space means that some nonlocal minds are sensitive to projections from the transcendental of images of locations far outside the direct perception of that individual. The inevitable inaccuracy and unreliability of such nonlocal projections can be explained by realizing that only part of the transcendental realm is projected.
| Question: Do you know somebody who is precognitive? Somebody who is clairvoyant? Somebody who remembers past lives? |
We can now see the similarities between the different transcendental realms. All of them transcend space-time, but all are the source of space-time and of the entire manifestation. They are all characterized by wholeness because they cannot be divided or separated into parts. Because they are whole, all time and space events exist in them in implicit form. In each moment the entire manifestation arises and dissolves, to be replaced by the manifestation of the next moment. These processes of manifestation and dissolution go on continuously. (This process is directly observed in Buddhist meditation, see Sections 14.5, 14.6, 24.2.)
None of the transcendental realms can be described or defined using space-time concepts because they are all transcendental to space-time. They are unperceivable to us but all contain the blueprints for the perceived manifestation. The material world is projected from the archetypal realm of Plato in our adaptation of the cave allegory and appears by wavefunction collapse from Goswami’s transcendental realm. It is manifested from leftover memories, desires, and fears in Nisargadatta's version, and is selected by consciousness from Ramesh's ocean of consciousness.
The purpose of postulating a transcendental realm is to attempt to explain phenomena that have no other explanation. This is done in order to maintain some semblance of an objective reality, but the desperation in doing so is exposed by the fact that all transcendental realms are intrinsically unverifiable. In this they resemble the epicycles that Ptolemy invented in A.D. 140 in order to retain an earth-centered cosmology. The need to resort to such gimmicks conceals a fundamental defect that it would be better to reveal than to conceal.
The reason Goswami hypothesized a transcendental realm was to explain how wavefunction collapse could occur without violating Einstein locality. However, as we saw in Section 7.10, in a transcendental realm it is meaningless to talk about the Schrödinger equation, its wavefunctions, and wavefunction collapse, all of which normally are conceived to occur in space-time. Conceiving a transcendental realm is tantamount to sweeping the whole problem under the rug so that it is out of sight, or to invoking an unexplained and unexplainable god as creator, or to implicitly admitting the impossibility of an explanation.
We have come a long way from our discussion of objective reality and materialism in Sections 1.1 and 1.2. We have persisted in trying to find an objectively real explanation for all observable phenomena. In doing so we have seen that the concept of objective reality starts to become so unwieldy that it threatens to collapse under its own dead weight. The transcendental realms can hardly be called objective since there is no agreement at all about their properties, existence, or even necessity. In Goswami's theory, we were driven to consider them by our embarrassment at having to deal with wavefunction collapse, but we ended up with something even less tenable. The inescapable progression of our thought from the material and tangible to the immaterial and incomprehensible strongly suggests that we are reaching the limits of science, and perhaps even breaching them (see also the discussion of this point in Section 6.10). It also strongly suggests that science is incapable of explaining everything, a possibility we already discussed in Section 5.6.
The transcendental realms were invented to attempt to explain how the manifestation arises out of the unmanifest, and are imagined to hold an intermediate position between the two. It is easy to see that this is no explanation at all because we then are forced to ask, how does the transcendental itself arise from the unmanifest? ... ad infinitum. Perhaps the real problem is our insistence on an objective reality in the first place. We question that assumption in Chapter 9.