As modern science progresses, it offers more and more conceptual understanding of this beautiful experience of transcendence.
One of the most interesting new approaches to the workings of brain and consciousness has been developed by the Dutch scientist Pim van Lommel.
Pim van Lommels take on the unified field of consciousness centres around the concepts of non-locality and interconnectedness: “The mind seems to contain everything at once in a timeless and placeless interconnectedness. The information is not encoded in a medium but is stored non-locally as wave functions in nonlocal space, which also means that all information is always and everywhere immediately available.” (van Lommel, p. 224, 244)
The implications of this hypothesis challenge dramatically the perception of individual consciousness as something limited and folded upon itself: “In this new approach, complete and endless consciousness with retrievable memories has its origins in a nonlocal space in the form of indestructible and not directly observable wave functions.
These wave functions, which store all aspects of consciousness in the form of information, are always present in and around the body. The brain and the body merely function as a relay station receiving part of the overall consciousness and part of our memories in our waking consciousness in the form of measurable and constantly changing electromagnetic fields. In this view, brain function can be seen as a transceiver; the brain does not produce but rather facilitates consciousness.” (van Lommel, p. 265)
What sounds radically new in the field of neuroscience, has been a familiar paradigm in modern physics. The seeds of the theory were laid already by Albert Einstein himself when he postulated that everything in the universe is relative and the existence of different worlds and forms and phenomena can only be accounted for in terms of relativity.
One of the first physicists to take this perspective to its logical and scientific conclusion was David Bohm.
The founding father of quantum physics proposed several metaphors for what the reality of energy/matter continuum looked like. “The universe and everything in it – including us – may, in fact, be part of a grand cosmic pattern where all portions are evenly shared by every other.
Encapsulating this unified view of nature, Bohm simply states: “The new form of insight can perhaps best be called undivided wholeness in flowing movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow.
Towards the end of his life, David Bohm relied mostly on the concept of a hologram to explain the workings of a unified and undivided cosmos: “Reflecting on the interrelated nature of creation, he became more convinced that the universe works like a grand cosmic hologram.
In a hologram, every portion of whatever the object is contains that object in its entirety, only on a smaller scale. From Bohm’s perspective, what we see as our world is actually the projection of something even more real that’s happening at a deeper level of creation. It is this deeper level that’s the original – the implicate.
In this view of “As above, so below” and “As within, so without,” patterns are contained within patterns, complete in and of themselves and different only in scale.
Bohm’s theories have been gradually sculpted out with experimental evidence and theoretical detail. Beneath their different names and shades – superstrings, compactification, Kac-Moody algebras – all these complex, numerical models point to the same basic truth: everything blossoms out from an underlying unity.
Zooming into a broccoli: A beautiful image of natural fractals. Self-similar patterns become visible to the naked eye with magnification.
Of course, nothing new in this for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a descendent of a long lineage of Indian yogis. Like all spiritual sages down the ages, Maharishi was fully aware of this unified field, and characterized it in very specific terms: “The unified field is fundamentally a field of consciousness.
The field is known as atman, meaning “pure consciousness,” or “self,” since the unified field constitutes the deepest reality and hence the true identity of everything in nature.
The term “consciousness” is clearly distinguished from the highly individualized and anthropocentric sense of the term common to everyday experience: it is used to denote a completely universal field of “pure, self-interacting” consciousness — consciousness aware of itself alone, devoid of any individualizing influence or external objects of experience.
As we can observe the idea of unified field extends across cultures and across time. What this field actually is can be described in as many ways as there are people alive. The neuroscience, quantum physics and ancient traditions seem to agree to some degree on the nature’s interconnected & coherent display of reality.
There seems to be an intuitive cross cultural tendency to align with it, whatever it is or it may be or however it flows, moves and fluctuates. And it is obvious it does change and there is nothing fixating about it. As the field or if you want to name it a cosmic fractal, is evolving, so are we together with it.
So it makes sense to strive for this type of quest, since we perceive harmony and coherence when we tap into this crucial alignment. It postulates that an ever changing reality of infinite possibilities describes also our existence within this unified field.
For us, the everyday experience is dualistic. There seems to be a separate, subjective ‘me’ who witnesses objects, thoughts, events, emotions… Yet by means of flow alignment practices, we can glimpse the true reality of a unified field of consciousness.
Everything is one, and everything is many – at the very same time and without any contradiction whatsoever.
The concept of a universal energy flow is not a new one. The ancient Chinese called this flow Chi/ Qi; the ancient Hindus called it Prana. The disciplines that developed in those two cultures – t’ai chi and yoga, respectively- are based on the art of tuning in to the flow of energy and using it to centre the self. Human beings, on their most fundamental level, are packets of quantum energy constantly exchanging information with this weaving energy sea.
The core essence of flow philosophy is fluidity … which can be described as an optimal alignment with the stream of totality.
There is no point to go against this stream, since we are in it, immersed in it, made from it and it makes us possible in the first place. So this recognition that we are a part of a whole and therefore it is crucial to be in sync with it, is adding yet another layer to our existence.
Flow in essence removes obstacles that prevent us from achieving optimal flow in any experience, it promotes fluidity. It works to clear the “flow conduits”, remove clutter that prevent fluid response to the reality, shortly it puts us in a state of Flow alignment.
This alignment brings joy, peace and harmony to an individual mind, making life worth living.
Flow philosophy focuses on what really can be achieved based on millenia of cross cultural observations of the same phenomena.
It is free from dogmatic promises of some type of “fixed enlightment state” but rather deals with much more intuitive idea that “enlightment” is not a fixed state, but rather a joyous spiral and perpetual rediscovery, a constantly fluctuating sense of illusion of separated self versus feeling of unity.
In a quantum computer that we call the brain, everything fluctuates, works in cycles and can be best described as a intertwined collection of waves. So anything that emerges out of this fine tuned system that we are, is inherently bound to the same rules.
Therefore, it is of outmost importance that we do not place ourselves into some kind of eternal strive for illusionary perfection and beat ourselves in humble defeat after realizing we will never achieve it, but rather enjoy within the alignment to the flow and enjoying the “perfection” that is already happening.
Perfection is just an idea, there is no fixed “perfect” state (it is actually a neurological impossibility), but there is for sure an optimal state in a given circumstance. And flow alignment is promoting just that, alignment to the flow, flow of experience, flow of us within the flow of surroundings and alignment with the flow of the “unified field”.
Any state that is perceived as fixed, imposes different characteristics to that perception as if not fixed. And any state that is fixed will inevitably lead to a stale perception of it, because of an iron rule of hedonic adaptation. This also means that experience itself needs fluctuation, needs dynamics for our perception even to be able to observe it. Even if one state could exist, it would be boring as hell. We need it to be dynamic.
By observing and finding flow anywhere on its wavy up and down curve, you are already there, in a christian or muslim heaven, in buddhist Nirvana or you can name it flow.
It is here, it is now, it is in this life and not the next, it is reachable and it is not even hard. You can experience unity within certain level of intensity, but taking into account that it fluctuates and is never quite the same, is liberating us from false unattainable goals and bringing way more satisfaction and contentment to one who practices it. It’s like democratizing Nirvana.
We cannot be completely thoughtless, we will never really remove all the layers of our personalities and it is absolutely not wise to discard millenia of struggle for nature to give us this level of cognitive abilities. We should respect it.
But … by switching between the recognized illusion of self that is generated by the prefrontal cortex and state of experience absence of self through flow, we are able to experience pockets of unity of different intensity and lengths. This gives us an overwhelming joy of constant rediscovery & expansion through polarized experiencing of both states, unity and individuality.
