What is God?

Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him…If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them…I and my Father are one. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you…for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God? …the Father is in me, and I in him. Therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of their hand.

Gospel of John, Chapter 10

Neither pray I for these [people] alone…That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them, and thou in me.

Gospel of John, Chapter 17

The Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah which takes its name from that verse, explains that the enlightened are those who ponder the deepest “secret of wisdom.” What is that secret? The answer varies from text to text, tradition to tradition, but in the Zohar and elsewhere, the deepest secret is that, despite all appearances, all things, and all of us, are like ripples on a single pond, motes of a single sunbeam, the letters of a single word. The true reality of our existence is Ein Sof, infinite, and thus the sense of separate self that we all have–the notion that “you” and “I” are individuals with souls separate from the rest of the universe–is not ultimately true. The self is a phenomenon, an illusion, a mirage.

Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (2009)

I beg leave to add my own, necessarily subjective, view of the philosophical implications [of this book]…In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition

ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).

Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize in Physics (1933),

Epilogue to What is Life?, The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1944)

If the Word has been made man, it is so that men may be made gods.

St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, Martyr, 2nd century

God became man so that men might become gods.

St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, 4th century

The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged.

Aziz Nasafi, Islamic Mystic, 13th century;

quoted in Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter (1958), Chapter 4

The God of the mystics does not arrive readymade and prepackaged…It is possible to acquire some of the mystical attitudes. Even if we are incapable of the higher states of consciousness achieved by a mystic, we can learn that God does not exist in any simplistic sense, for example, or that “God” is only a symbol of a reality that ineffably transcends it.

Karen Armstrong, former Roman Catholic nun, A History of God (1993)

Vipassana is the Buddhist concept of realization: “to see things as they really are.” And Samadhi is the last step of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path; in the Hindu and Yogic traditions, it forms the last part of the Yoga Sutras; in Jainism, it is viewed as the “meditation of pure Self”; and in Sikhism, it is the act of “complete concentration on God.” Samadhi is a defining teaching in all eastern schools of thought. Its practice is first made known to us in the writings and teachings of the Vedas (Veda is Sanskrit for “knowledge”)–particularly in the teachings of Vedanta (Sanskrit for the “end” or “purpose” of the Vedas); and the Upanishads, a group of early Vedic texts, written circa 1,000 B.C.E.

Our science–Greek science–is based on objectivation, whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. But I do believe that this is precisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought. That will not be easy, we must beware of blinders–blood-transfusion always needs great precaution to prevent clotting. We do not wish to lose the logical precision that our scientific thought has reached, and that is unparallelled anywhere at any epoch.

Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter, Chapter 4: The Oneness of Mind

In the West, Vipassana has been termed “mindfulness,” with the practice of Vipassana (Anapanasati, the mindfulness of breathing) marketed as “mindfulness meditation”; similarly, Samadhi has been translated to “transcending,” with its practice popularized and marketed under the name “Transcendental Meditation.”

Studied by academics at major universities throughout the country and gaining a growing audience among the business communities (particularly in the technology sector), both mindfulness and transcendental meditation have been shown extremely effective in alleviating any number of stress and anxiety-based health conditions:

http://www.tm.org/research-on-meditation

http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/mindfulness

Modern psychology, however, does not as of yet recognize the validity of “transcending”; in this view–the view of Freud, from whom modern psychologists which inherited the idea–the “oceanic feeling” of bliss and limitlessness is but a “fragment of infantile consciousness,” “a description of the feeling the infant has before it learns there are other persons in the world.”

Although Schrödinger was the most articulate on this point, he was not the only physicist to have reached such a conclusion. Oppenheimer before him had learned Sanskrit and considered the Bhagavad Gita one of his favorite, most influential books. And Schrödinger reportedly said of Heisenberg and Bohr:

While he was working on Quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore (recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913). He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in Physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in Quantum Physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China (Niels Bohr would later add the Ying-Yang symbol to his coat of arms).

If the oceanic feeling is indeed a reversion to our original nature, our true nature–of inseparability from our exterior Macroscopic Reality–then the Soma of Brave New World may indeed be the Soma of our ancient Vedic ancestors. It is therefore our sacred duty to ensure such Soma does not fall prey to evil hands. That which turns men to gods is powerful beyond compare.

It is maintained that recent discoveries in physics have pushed forward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and the object. This boundary, so we are told, is not a sharp boundary at all…Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter (1958), Chapter 2: The Principle of Objectivation

What, then, of death?

I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.

Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist, first to synthesize LSD-25

For further reading:

The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964), Timothy Leary

My View of the World (1961), Erwin Schrödinger

Margins of Reality (1987), Robert Jahn

How the Hippies Saved Physics (2012), David Kaiser

The Perennial Philosophy (1945), Aldous Huxley

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/feb/07/wonders-life-physicist-revolution-biology

http://jstiga.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/quantum-four-fathers-erwin-schrodinger-neils-bohr-werner-heisenberg-john-von-neumann/