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!
