Episode 01 - Why Upanishads Now?.

WHY UPANISHADS NOW?

A LESSON FROM CHINA The following topically relevant news report from the New York Times recently, would underscore the need for our present generation to appreciate and re-create, as much as possible, the ambiance in which the Upanishads were wrought millennia ago: 

"WHAT KEEPS THE CHINESE UP AT NIGHT"

"In their quest for old certainties, ordinary people are enthusiastically talking once more about Confucius. Prosperous families send their children to classes to learn about the philosopher's "great harmony", and China is creating hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world. .. It is not an argument between Communism and Western models for society. It is a search for the Chinese soul and for an alternative to a tortured contemporary psyche."

… AND A CHASTENING PROD FROM QUANTUM PHYSICS ASSAILING MATERIALIST THOUGHT..

Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, the theoretical physicist who became interested in Vedanta philosophy - particularly its ideas of the universe as an all-pervading consciousness - wrote that materialism was "not logically consistent with present quantum mechanics". He wasn't alone. Sir Rudolf Peierls, another great 20th-century physicist, wrote, "The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being...including knowledge and consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing."

Taking his cue from these two, Stephen Barr, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware, has written a monograph titled “Does Quantum Physics Make it Easier to Believe in God?”.  He argues it does for one very simple reason: materialism is dead.

For centuries, it was thought that science was opposed to God because it believed in materialistic reducibility. In this view, minds or consciousness, for instance, could be reduced to being a manifestation of the biological working of the brain based on the chemistry of nerve cells that were governed by laws laid down by physics. And physics, of course, could be reduced to matter and its interactions. Nothing missing.

But quantum physics has now ushered in this enormous amount of uncertainty in matter that can only be resolved with the interaction of a mind on it. Or, as Barr puts it, "If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?"