A Comparative Study

A Comparative Study

This short article is a short comparative study of quantum physics, Vedanta and the teaching of Don Juan as written by his student Carlos Castaneda.

I just highlight a couple of things which later on I will elaborate. Whatever is written here is purely my own interpretation and responsibility. There is an enormous amount of things we can talk about, but in this article I will just make a beginning. As there are so many things to discuss, we can begin anywhere. So hitch you backpack and let us go. It is going to be a long track through many different landscapes.

According to Nicola Tesla and Einstein there is no material world, no material universe, but only energy. According to Tesla the Universe is made of energy that vibrates at certain frequency, and that if one thinks of the universe one has to think of the number 432. Personally I have no idea what this number represents, so don’t ask me. I just mention it because you find this everywhere, but then we will forget about it.

Now I am sitting at my table, writing. The table is made up of atoms, billions of atoms. However if you blow the atom up to the size of the cupola of the Vatican, the actual particle is the size of a tiny bird circling within the empty dome.

In other words, the atom is for 99.9999999 % empty space.

So if my table is made of empty space, why do I experience it as solid? Why do I hit my knee against it? This is the riddle that all these studies of East and West face. And each of them has their own explanation which is very similar.

As I said, we have time to discuss all these things, from tables to the Void, from the Eagle to meditation. Think of this website as a walk we are taking, passing many sights and hearing many sounds. Let us just enjoy all the things we discover on the way, and as I said before, I am not a scientist, I am like everyone else, but I have made it so far to 84 years and some things I have picked up on the way which I like to share with you.

As we have to start somewhere, I will start here with the Upanishads, in particular with the Chandogya Upanishad, and with the story which maybe is one of the most famous stories of all time, the story of the boy called Svetaketu and his father and the tree. Moreover everybody starts with this story, so might as well join the queue.

Svetaketu was sent by his father to a famous guru to learn all about life and the universe. That was quite common practice a couple of thousand years ago. So the boy went and spent 12 years at school, learning a lot of things. But there was one thing that either he did not learn or did not understand: the nature of the universe, called Brahman.

So returning to his father he told him what he had learned, but that he did not understand what this ‘Brahman’ was.

At this his father told him to go to a certain tree, pick one of its fruit and cut it in half. The boy did so, and the father asked him what he saw. The boy answered: seeds. Take one and cut it in half, the father ordered. The boy did so and the father asked: now what do you see? At which the boy answered: Nothing, the seed is EMPTY. At which the father answered with the phrase known all over the world: TAT TVAM ASI, that is you. That emptiness is you, is the world, the universe, is BRAHMAN, the Void.

Now I am fascinated with the word ‘void’. What does it mean? How can something be a ‘void’, and is that then still something, or is it nothing. Usually if we use a word it means something. Something that you can see, touch, think about. How can you think about or touch or see a void?

Several quantum physicists have quoted this sentence of the Chandogya Upanishad to describe the universe. This emptiness, this Void, however, according to them is not empty, but is the emptiness from which everything comes. It is the void brimming with energy, as the empty seed from which a huge tree grows.

So how a void can be brimming with energy I do not know, but as Tesla talks about energy in the modern West and Vedanta talks about Brahman, on the other side of the globe, in the desert of New Mexico, Don Juan, the teacher of Carlos Castaneda, teaches that the universe is made up of billions of fine threads of energy, called the emanations of the Eagle, the Eagle being the Toltec counterpart of Brahman ( string theory ??). What is in a name? Personally I love the idea of the Eagle.

In these three traditions the availability of experiencing this energy, these emanations, Brahman , the Eagle, is extremely limited. We are so human oriented in our hubris that we do not doubt that ‘our’ world is ‘the’ world. We do not reflect that the eagle (the bird) can see a mouse from a kilometer height, that a dog can hear a sound from a kilometer distance, that a snake can follow a mouse ‘tasting’ the body heat. We do not, in our self absorption, reflect that each species on earth, probably even the plant world itself, lives in its own world, in its own bubble, and that our world is only one among many ‘worlds’. let us say with don Juan that each species in its way has taken a bundle of the eagles emanations and made his world out of that.

According to Indian ‘anatomy’, we have 5 senses of knowledge, with which to experience the outside world, the 5 Jnanindriyas. Indriya means sense and jnana means knowledge.

They are the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the skin. These we share with our neighbors, the animals, but not in the same degree. These indriyas however are not very reliable. They are only superficially useful. Moreover they are very fragile, as everyone who is blind or deaf can testify.

Anyway, they are the:

Eyes: The sense that gives information of things the farthest removed from us are the eyes: we can see stars billions of light years afar. Vision discriminates differences in electro-magnetic radiaton.

Ears: The next sense are the ears. Their range is already much more limited. The ears rely on the percussive impact of molecules of air, it discriminates difference in waves moving through air. Hearing provides information about events at an intermediate range of distance. I will come back to this later on.

Nose: The sense of smell, the nose, detects differences in the chemical compositions of the air around.

Tongue: Taste detects differences in the chemical compositions dissolved in liquid.

Touch: With touch we trespass into the body itself. Touch moves from the outside to the inside of the skin. The skin is an extremely sensitive organ which carries information from outside the skin towards the inside. Think of a mosquito landing on your cheek, you notice that immediately. Here the skin is the borderline that the outside world has to cross to bring the information inside.

So the Jnanindriyas work from the outside of the body towards the body itself and towards the inside of the body.

However, as I said before, we have to be extremely cautious in judging, because among all the animals, our senses of knowledge are the POOREST, and they are easily damaged or misinterpreted.

In all traditions the availability of experiencing the ‘void’, the energy, the Eagle’s emanations beyond these Jnanindriyas are extremely limited. We have very few options. Moreover, not only does the world differ from species to species, but also in the human world. Personally I think that each one of us lives in his/her own world, bubble, cocoon. There is no way for me to know if Johnny sees the same tree that I see, or maybe my tree for him is an elephant