Vivekananda's Quantum Leap

For a rationalist, the first issue is: "How can all religions be right?" They talk of different Gods or sometimes of no God. Either one religion is right, and the rest are in error, or quite likely the whole lot are in error! [Vivekananda] reconciled this disjoint in his address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He suggested that at the experiential level all prophets encountered the same spirit, but a variation takes place when they try to give expression to their spiritual experiences. This variation is inevitable because it reflects a variation in the mindsets of different cultures in different historic periods. Over time, each expression ossifies into a religion or a different sect within the same religion. It is not that one is right and the rest are wrong- they are various attempts to infuse spirituality in greater society. This insight is popularly called religious pluralism. Religious pluralism recognizes variation in spiritual expressions and challenges exclusivist claims made by any religion. To get a conceptual grasp of the quantum we have to refer to one of the talks by Vivekananda on raja yoga. In this talk he said that the whole creation can be explained in terms of just two entities! The first is all penetrating existence (akash) and the second entity is a shudder in existence (prana). He gave this talk in 1895 when quantum was unheard of. Quantum physics insists that the world we see and experience as the empirical universe is not an objective reality but a multitude of wiggles in existence. I tell the physicists that the only way they can appreciate quantum is by giving up their fixation on matter and their attempt to explain the world in material terms. Science has entered a new phase, where matter has been severely demoted- in fact, it is valued as a mere appearance. Adi Shankara and Vivekananda must be smiling! A major paradigm shift is in the making- a shift that will merge science into spirituality.