WHY EVERYONE SHOULD MEDITATE

 

WHY MEDITATE?

Why should scientists - or anyone else - learn how to meditate? Answer: because one cannot describe what one has not experienced, and the only thing we experience directly is our own consciousness. As human beings, most of Reality is outside of the sphere of individual consciousness. Without direct experience of Reality, one can only imagine and hypothesize about what the nature of Reality might be. That’s why the world is awash in theories about what could be, and there is a great thirst for the Reality that is.

While theories about Reality may be good, and they may be partly true, they will never explain the Reality that actually exists. Fortunately, the universe exists primarily to offer possibilities for conscious beings to  experience Reality; but, before you can have a direct experience of anything, you must dissolve the blinding bubble of belief that you have created around yourself by your own ego identification. Dissolving that illusive bubble is what meditation is all about.

I was born as Edward Roy Close in 1936, and partly because I remembered past lives in Tibet, India, the Middle East, and Europe, I chose to be a scientist this time, earned degrees in mathematics, physics, and  environmental engineering, and studied the metaphysics behind the world’s major religions on the side, so that I could learn - and/or remember -how to meditate. Unfortunately, most mainstream scientists are too ego bound at present to even consider learning how to meditate, thereby missing the main point of being conscious by limiting their investigations to the dead-end belief system of materialism. Fortunately, a few of us are beginning to see beyond the cage of our physical limitations and may eventually escape into the greater Reality of Cosmic Consciousness. I am blessed to have met some who have.

Sri Daya Mata, the President and spiritual leader of Self-Realization Fellowship was one, and she initiated me into the practice of Kirya Yoga on September 17, 1960, in Los Angeles. In the 1960’s and 70’s, while I was working for the Department of Interior in Arlington Virginia as one of the seven charter members of the Government’s first Environmental Systems Group, I wrote and/or co-authored a number of papers on the mathematical modelling of environmental systems. I also completed the first year of my PhD program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland during that time, and I wrote my first book between 1969 and 1972.  At the same time, I  was meditating daily using the Kriya techniques, and serving as the Self-Realization Meditation Group Leader in Washington DC. I called the book I was writing “The Book of Atma”. It was published by Libra Publishers in New York in 1977. In it, I tried to describe some of what I had learned from my meditation experiences.

Chapter II of the Book of Atma was about Meditation. In it I pointed out the fact that the experience of meditation is more difficult to describe than the taste of a tree-ripened mango or the exhilaration of sky diving, and that one should not confuse meditation techniques with meditation consciousness. They are two different things. The Kriya techniques, designed to align body and mind with spirit, were passed down from an age of higher mental and spiritual virtue. See The Holy Science by Sri Yukteswar Giri and The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahamsa Yogananda, for details.

In 1989, after spending a few years in the Middle East, and some time in India, I published my second book, Infinite Continuity, a book introducing the calculus of distinctions, which  reconciles relativity with quantum theory. Before it was published, I sent a  copy of the manuscript to Stephen Hawking, asking him to review it. Being an atheist, he didn’t like it and saw it as pantheism. Infinite Continuity has been out of print for more than thirty years now because of lack of interest.  Most scientists were not willing to invest the time and effort it takes to learn a new mathematical logic linking consciousness with relativity and quantum physics – or, for that matter, even to learn how to meditate.

In 1996 at the University of Arizona, during the Tucson II conference Toward a Science of Consciousness, I presented a short infinite-descent proof of the existence of non-quantum receptors in consciousness. That presentation, along with other things I had learned in meditation, became the basis of my third book, Transcendental Physics, ISBN 0-934426-78-3, Paradigm Press, 1997, and a later edition, ISBN  0-595-09175-X was published by iUniverse in 2001.

Between sessions of the week-long meeting in Tucson, I was able to meet many of the leading thinkers in consciousness studies from all around the world. During a brief encounter with one of them, who happened to be a Nobel-Prize winning physicist, I asked him if he had started meditating yet. He reacted as if I had suggested that he should try to contact space aliens with a Ouija board! I had read some of his work, so I knew that he wouldn’t be that open-minded; but I thought since he was presenting at this meeting, he might be interested in learning how to expand his consciousness to become more self-aware and less self-absorbed! Apparently not!

The meditation consciousness that can be experienced through the regular and prolonged practice of Kriya Yoga can include the ability to descend to the quantum level of physical reality and see electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, and atoms. This ability is known by advanced yogis as a siddhi (mental virtue) called Anima in Sanskrit. Using it, you can see that the elementary objects that make up the physical universe are not particles, they are energy vortices in the substrate of Reality.