90. What Life is All About – Tony Nader

Tony Nader is a globally recognized Vedic Scholar, and as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s successor, he is head of the international Transcendental Meditation centers in over 100 countries. But Nader is also a medical doctor and has a PhD in neuroscience, trained at Harvard and MIT. As you will notice in this episode, he includes thorough science when outlining his view on life and consciousness. In fact, Nader’s book One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness, published last year, is the perfect crossover between science and spirituality. It is counterintuitive for many people to see matter as something that arises from consciousness, rather than the other way around. But consciousness is primary, Tony explains. ”It has been shown through history, and more recent knowledge has demonstrated, that our senses only give us certain aspects of what reality is.” We perceive time and space as fixed, but the special and the general theory of relativity have shown that they are not. The smallest particles are not particles but fluctuations in a field. ”There is this theory of the unified field. The field interacts with itself. It creates waves, which adjust and move with each other. They create structures. The structures appear as objects. The more complex the structures are, the more complex objects they appear to form.” ”So what we perceive with our senses is real, but it is only one aspect of the true nature of things”, Tony says. Everything is completely interconnected. ”This is not wishful esoteric thinking any more, this is science.” Descartes introduced dualism by dividing the physical and the non-physical. But if we want a monistic view, an all-encompassing view, should we start in matter or in consciousness? Physicalists start in the former, obviously: Everything is physical, and consciousness mysteriously arises from matter. Already in the Vedic tradition, consciousness is primary. Today, the same view is held by for example the philosophical orientation called idealism (see ep 83, Bernardo Kastrup). But if consciousness is primary, how does it appear as matter? Why a big bang and physical manifestation? ”Consciousness wants to know itself in all possible ways. But when it is merely imagining all potentialities, it is knowing all this from its own unbounded perspective. It doesn't know what it is like to experience from those limited perspectives”, Tony says. Hence the manifestation into a universe of myriad aspects of the absolute consciousness: Entities at every possible level of consciousness. Time and space are concepts that allow for separation. If a thousand people are to sit down, you either put them one after another a thousand times in one chair, or you produce a thousand chairs they can sit in at the same time. From the maximum level of perceived separation, the journey goes back towards the absolute consciousness again. This is what Tony calls the synthesis path. From a human perspective, this is transcendence. ”All of this creation is just knowledge. It is to know from different perspectives. That is the force of life. That is what it is all about.” So, an absolute consciousness, an unbounded ocean of consciousness, is that what some call God? ”You can call it God, but this concept is defined differently in different belief systems.” To practice transcendental meditation is to go back to the ultimate self, reestablish wholeness, grow in consciousness. Groups of people practicing TM have actually been shown to diminish the levels of crime and violence in large areas. ”The research is accurate and published in peer reviewed journals. We can change the collective awareness.” Tony’s website Tony’s book Transcendental meditation