Hanging Onto the Tiger’s Ears

OK. Hold on—here we go. This is that deep piece I’ve been threatening you with for the past week or more. Well, it’s the FIRST of the deep pieces—this is going to take more than one post to explore all its ramifications.
I’m not saying I UNDERSTAND what I’m going to be presenting here. Hopefully, we can reach some understanding of it together?

This information is taken from “Science and the Akashic Field” by Ervin Laszlo.
Laszlo is described by those who critique the book as ‘a scientist and a philosopher.’ What sort of science he studies, is not named, but his book reads like stuff from the quantum-physics discipline.

The book describes the Unified Theory so many scientists are on about these days. Laszlo explains what has happened so far, what most scientists are seeking and explains why, in his opinion, they will fail. He posits that unless consciousness, particularly the consciousness of the universe as a whole, is included in the mix no theory will stand on its own.
Most scientists are unlikely to include the universe’s consciousness for the simple reason that they don’t believe it is there. Still, it’s interesting to speculate on whether or not a Grand Unified Theory [GUT] can be verified without its inclusion.

At the beginning of the book is this note:
“’Akasha’ is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘ether’: all pervasive space. Originally signifying ‘radiation’ or ‘brilliance’ in Indian philosophy akasha was considered the first and most fundamental of the five elements—the others being vata [air], agni [fire], ap [water] and prithivi [earth]. Akasha embraces the property of all five elements: it is the womb from which everything we perceive with our senses has emerged and into which everything will ultimately re-descend. The Akashic Record [also called the Akashic Chronicle] is the enduring record of all that happens and has ever happened in space and time.”
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Laszlo opens the book with a bit of background:
“[Theories of Everything] attempt to achieve what Einstein once called, ‘Reading the mind of God.’ He said that if we could bring together all the laws of physical nature into a consistent set of equations, we could explain all the features of the universe based on that equation; that would be tantamount to reading the mind of God.”
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Laszlo postulates that meaningfulness is, itself, an important part of science though most scientists don’t pay much attention to it. This is a rather sad state of affairs because we, as a species, value meaningfulness. However, if we find meaning or meaningfulness in the world around us, we are accused of anthropomorphizing animals or the earth or the universe itself.
But, if we deny meaningfulness in all molecules, minerals, plants, animals other than ourselves, the planet, the universe, we are doomed to be born into a meaningless world, to live, work, play, love and, eventually, die in a world and a universe that shares nothing of value with us.
In some ways, I suppose, it might be nice to place ourselves above the rest of the world. WE have meaning—nothing else does. However, just as it is arrogant to suppose that this planet alone in all the universe harbors life, that we alone of all species on this planet know that we exist and look outside ourselves and wonder—so, it seems to me, it is the height of arrogance to believe that we alone have consciousness.

Laszlo sets out to show us the consciousness of the universe and the necessary place of that consciousness within any GUT that might be discovered.
fwiw, Stephen Hawking does attempt to find meaning in his theories. Most hard scientists don’t. Of course, such an undertaking can bring on ridicule from fellow scientists as when Hawking stated that the universe must have come about in order to bring us into being—the proof is that we are here. He’s not the first scientist to be ridiculed for postulating meaning in the universe. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross brought fire and brimstone down on her head for doing the same thing toward the end of her life.

Searching for the Universe’s Information
In 1907, Nicola Tesla spoke of an ‘original medium’ that fills space and compared it to Akasha, the ‘light carrying ether’ first put forth by Indian philosophers. He wrote that this original medium becomes matter when prana, cosmic energy, acts on it. When the action ceases, matter vanishes back into the Akasha. Since this medium fills all of space, everything that takes place in space can be referred to it. Kesla said that Einstein’s curvature of space could not account for the phenomena he was referring to.
Within a few years, however, science had embraced Einstein’s mathematically elaborate space-time and banished Tesla’s space-filling-ether or force field.
Today it is being revived. A small but growing number of scientists are again exploring the role of information in nature and locating nature’s information field in the quantum vacuum.
Before Einstein’s theories came along, the idea of the luminiferous ether held sway. It was said to occupy all of space and cause friction—slowing objects down as they passed through it. However, experimentation failed to produce the friction/slowing phenomenon and the ‘absolute vacuum’, the idea of empty space, took its place.
However, the cosmic vacuum turned out to be anything but empty. When science started pursuing the GUT, they found that the concept of a vacuum transformed from emptiness to a medium that carries the Zero Point Field [ZPF]. The name derives from the fact that energies exist in this field even at the point where all classical forms of energy vanish—at the 0 point on the Kelvin scale. The roots of all of nature’s fields and forces were ascribed to the mysterious energy sea of the ‘unified vacuum.’

Interactions can be demonstrated between the unified vacuum or akasha or the akashic field or whatever you want to call it and observed matter and processes in the physical realm.
In the 1960’s, Paul Dirac showed that matter particle fields produce a polarization of the ZPF of the vacuum and the vacuum, in turn, affects the particle field’s spin, mass, charge or angular momentum.
At about the same time Andrei Sakharov postulated that the shielding of the ZPF within the vacuum produced such things as the slowing of clocks and the shrinking of yardsticks when they approach the speed of light. This is a world-shattering idea because, in this concept, the vacuum is more than relativity theory’s four-dimensional continuum—it is not just the geometry of space time but a real physical field producing real physical effects.
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OK, that’s enough for the moment—I think I need to go lie down for a while.
The fact that I’m a Scholar brings this especially home for me. So THAT’S what I’m going to be dumping all my experiences into? My head is spinning over here.

After I’ve taken some time to just breathe for a while, I’ll take another swipe at all of this.