Summary:
Dr. Bilimoria is a multi-faceted individual with expertise in engineering, science, philosophy, and the esoteric traditions.
- Background and Expertise
Dr. Bilimoria has a diverse background, including work as a consultant engineer in the oil and gas industry, as well as deep knowledge of Eastern and Western esoteric traditions. - Bridging Science and Spirituality
A significant portion of the interview focuses on Dr. Bilimoria’s efforts to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. He discusses the limitations of materialistic science and the need for a more holistic approach that incorporates consciousness and spiritual insights. - Theosophy and Esoteric Traditions
Dr. Bilimoria shares his insights on Theosophy and various esoteric traditions, explaining how these ancient wisdom teachings can complement modern scientific understanding. - Consciousness and Human Potential
The interview delves into topics such as the nature of consciousness, human potential, and the evolution of consciousness. Dr. Bilimoria presents ideas on how individuals can develop their inner faculties and expand their awareness. - Critique of Mainstream Science
Throughout the conversation, Dr. Bilimoria offers critiques of mainstream scientific approaches, particularly in areas such as consciousness studies and the understanding of human nature. He advocates for a more inclusive scientific paradigm that acknowledges non-physical aspects of reality.
The interview provides a rich exploration of the intersection between science, spirituality, and human potential, offering readers insights into Dr. Bilimoria’s unique perspective on these complex topics.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the interviews menu where you’ll see them arranged in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page which explains alternatives to PayPal. And another thing that we’ve got going, I don’t know how Edi feels about this, today’s guest, but we have a spiritual chatbot that has been created over the past year or so into which over 100,000 relevant documents have been loaded, including 1,700 of the world’s sacred texts. And I think it gives better results on any kind of spiritual or philosophical question than you’re likely to get from any of the commercial chatbots. And it’s free, of course, so there’s a menu for that on batgap.com. I just referred to Edi. You’re wondering, “Who’s Edi?” My guest today is Dr. Edi Billimoria. He was born in India and educated at the universities of London, Sussex and Oxford. He presents an unusual blend of experience in the fields of science, arts and philosophy. Professionally, Edi is an award-winning engineer and consultant to the petrochemical, oil and gas, transport and construction industries. In other words, he’s a true Buddha at the Gas Pump! (Laughter) He has been project manager.
Edi: I’m a gas pump, Rick, I don’t know about a Buddha.
Rick: You don’t have the pot belly, I’m sure, but you have the consciousness.
Edi: Sorry to interrupt.
Rick: That’s okay. He has been project manager and head of design for major innovative projects such as the Channel Tunnel, London Underground Systems, petrochemical plants, and offshore installations. Incidentally, have you heard the thing about slime molds being really good at designing subway and train networks?
Edi: Yes, yes.
Rick: Fascinating.
Edi: That is absolutely fascinating, yeah. A new invention or new discovery.
Rick: Yeah, maybe we’ll talk about slime molds later. He also worked in safety and environmental engineering for several Royal Navy projects, including the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and the fleet of offshore patrol vessels. Now the main reason we’re talking to him is that Edi has been a student of the perennial philosophy for over half a century. He has given courses and lectured extensively in the UK and internationally. He has organized and chaired conferences with the object of encouraging discourse on the different but overlapping roles of science, religion, and practical philosophy. And if you’ve been listening to my show, you know that I’m really fascinated about that relationship between science and spirituality and have given talks on it myself. Edi has published extensively in the fields of science, engineering, and the esoteric philosophy. Unfolding Consciousness, his book, has received recognition with the 2022 Grand Prize Award from the Scientific and Medical Network, and his earlier work, “The Snake and the Rope,” is also an award winner. So Edi is very well prepared, and he or his assistant sent me A list of discussion points for podcasts. I don’t usually do that, but I was thinking of actually using that list and reading the points verbatim, or perhaps with a little bit of modification and embellishment. So it’ll sound like I’m reading a prepared point, but I think that doing it this way will enable us to cover a lot more ground than if we just sort of go by the seat of our pants, you know, speaking about whatever comes to mind, although we can do that, too. And so the questions proceed kind of sequentially through the three major parts of his book, which is what, about 1,000, 1,200 pages or something altogether, giant book. And there is also a condensed version which is coming out or has it will be coming out?
Edi: It will be coming out.
Rick: Will be coming out. Anyway, I’m going to do that. But before I do that, Edi, let’s say, give us the elevator pitch. You know that phrase ‘elevator pitch’?
Edi: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. So if you had to just, you know, summarize in a couple of minutes what your whole magnum opus is about, what would it be?
Edi: It would be, Rick, that we owe science a huge debt of gratitude for our physical well-being, for our comfort, for everything in our physical lives and medicine. But the excessive emphasis on physical science has created a sort of hole in our hearts, if I can put it that way, and it’s created a spiritual vacuum where people seem to think that only physical materialistic science has and will have the answer to all of life’s problems and issues. And my purpose is never, of course, to castigate science, but to raise science to a higher metaphysics, to align science with spirituality, to show how spirituality and science are entirely compatible and one is not a substitute for the other, but they dance together.
Rick: Good.
Edi: Is that a good elevator pitch?
Rick: No, that’s excellent. That’s a good elevator pitch. It was a short ride on the elevator. It wasn’t the Sears Tower or something. Now I certainly don’t have your level of education, but I’ve been an amateur student of this stuff for a long time, and my understanding was that science was a valuable corrective to a more primitive age in which people were burned at the stake for suggesting that the stars might be other suns like our own, and they might even have planets around them that might even have beings on them and, you know, all kinds of nutty ideas were forced upon the public, which was very poorly educated by and large. And you know science came along and I heard a quote from Aldous Huxley recently in which he said that he felt that the development of the working hypothesis was the greatest contribution of the scientific revolution, you know, because it enabled us to, you know, think in a more empirical way about things and weigh them on the basis of the evidence or lack of it, rather than accepting some kind of dogma. But, obviously, I’ll let you take it from here in a second, obviously science isn’t the final step. It was a valuable corrective to the dogmatic precedent, but we’re not there yet in terms of a real balanced, integrated approach to knowledge which incorporates both objective and subjective means of gaining knowledge.
Edi: A corrective is a very good word to use because science acts, when used wisely, like an acid that strips away the crud and the rubbish and exposes the pure metal. But when the acid attacks the metal, that’s when the danger starts. So what I mean is it’s very important to understand science, if I may launch on this, because we use this word science. It’s used every day, dozens of times, and words that are used so often tend to lose their inner meaning. So science, the etymology is scary to learn, to find out from Scientia. So it is to learn and to explore everything. So let’s look at science in the traditional three ways: science with a small s, Science with a capital S, and SCIENCE in blazing capitals. Now science with a small s, and that’s not meant to sound demeaning at all, that refers to our physical well-being, our physical laws of nature, and the ontology is a materialist ontology. So, if I’m designing a bridge, my ontology is the physical laws of matter, as a civil engineer. I’m not thinking of the spiritual world or the bridge will fall down. But then let’s move on. We move beyond just quantity into quality and Science with a capital S is still within the realms of materialism but it’s a more refined materialism where it brings in the qualitative aspect, and that’s the great work of scientists like Brian Goodwin of Schumacher College. But then there is SCIENCE in blazing capitals, which really is to do with the mystical intuition into the deep inner nature of things. So we have to look at science on these three levels and not confuse one level with another level. If we’re dealing with the physical world we use physical laws but if we’re talking of consciousness and mind, to reduce that just to the physical is to make what the philosophers call complete category errors. So science in its true sense, there is nothing but science in the sense that there is science of yoga, there is science of love, most certainly. There’s a science of everything because we explore, we find out, we test, we experiment. But what you’re referring to, Rick, the mainstream science, has indeed been a corrective to strip away superstition but in stripping away the superstition, it’s gone a bit too far, in my opinion. It’s stripped away a lot of people’s understanding or relationship with the divine by saying, “Oh, that’s all rubbish, that’s all a science, it’s all a God delusion,” to quote one book.
Rick: Yeah, Richard Dawkins was that?
Edi: Yeah, of course it is, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, and one way I’ve thought about it is if you think of knowledge as a territory, there was a time when, at least in the West and perhaps also in the East, the Church kind of dominated the whole territory. And the territory included astronomy, it included, you know, evolution, it included geography, all kinds of subjects like that. And science came along and it began usurping aspects of the territory and really treating them much more intelligently and realistically than the church had been doing. But then I think there was hubris among scientists that they really had the ability to own the entire territory and that religious people or mystics were a bunch of goofballs, indulging in imagination.
Edi: Very well put, Rick. Very well put. Hubris, and arrogance and hubris, are casualties of the intellect. And so here, if I may, we have to talk about the modus operandi, the mindset that science uses, which is intellect. Right, now we have to be very clear what the intellect can do and what it can’t do. And now the trouble with words like God and consciousness is, if we try to define them, what we find is full of logical deductions and definitions that are one-sided and partial. Why? Because they are bound down to the starting point, which is the judging intellect and the one single point of view. So, what people regard as a fact is nothing more than a particular point of view. So, just taking that further, when scientists try to address questions outside the purview of mainstream science, talking of God and consciousness and all of that, they need to realize that the intellect cannot prove that which lies outside its boundaries, neither can the intellect disprove, because the intellect deals with finite things, and consciousness writ large, and God, and love, and all of these things are in the realm of the infinite. But if we have to speak in words and use intellect, the very least we can do is adopt what I would call an intellectual perambulation right around. So we’re not just dealing with one particular point of view, we’re dealing with each point of view as a fractal torn off from the whole. So, you know, in consciousness studies, you’ve got panpsychism and monism and theism and all of that, each claiming to know the whole truth rather than regarding these as fractals that deal with the whole. And just around this point off, Rick, all the great sages, and I cannot be more forceful about this, the mystics, the great sages, and the great scientists like Schrodinger, like Einstein, like Newton, have all pointed to the limitations of intellect. They never said discard intellect, obviously, but they said that reality, the truth, is beyond intellect, the horizontal dimension, and it’s above intellect, the vertical dimension. And no one could have put this better than Einstein in his 1943 speech during the darkest days of World War II to a Jewish seminary, when he said that “Our age is justly proud of its intellectual achievements, but we must be very careful never to make the intellect the master. He referred to the intellectuals as the priests, the priests, the intellectuals, and he said the intellect has powerful muscles but no personality. The intellect can only serve, it can never lead, and therefore it’s not surprising that this fatal blindness is transmitted from one generation to another. So here is the great Einstein, Schrodinger, they’ve all pointed out that the method of science that uses predominantly intellect is limited. It’s not wrong, but it will only go so far. The intellect, I’ll deal with this map, so to speak. The conceptual maps of the real. The map is not the territory, it points to the territory. So, I think I made the point, I hope.
Rick: Oh, you have. And one way that I understand it in simple terms is that whether east or west, there are two components to knowledge. There’s understanding and experience. And, you know, a scientist might come up with a certain understanding, which we know again in Huxley’s terms, a working hypothesis, but that doesn’t do him much good. He has to go about, you know, collecting, gathering evidence, empirical evidence, to either, you know, support or refute his hypothesis. Then when he has the evidence, it’s much more complete than just an intellectual concept. And same in the East, at least, you know, traditions like Vedanta and so on. There are all kinds of books you can read, but no teacher worth his salt would tell you to just read the books. He wants you to do something to get the experience that is talked about in the books, and that’s really the most important part of it.
Edi: Absolutely, so what you’re saying, Rick, is theory and practice have got to go hand in hand. If you have practice with unsound theory, you will go off on the wrong direction. The theory without practice is empty talk. So it’s the same with music, which has been an absolute love of my life. I still practice the piano every day for at least one hour. It used to be three hours. And there is only one way. You have to understand the theory, but then you have to practice, so the two do dance together. But experience is the ultimate court.
Rick: Now, I have an ongoing debate with a good friend who is an atheist, really, but a very nice fellow and good friend, and we have lovely talks. And he, one of his arguments is that, how do you know that through subjective means of gaining knowledge, such as meditation or even psychedelics, which he occasionally does, you’re actually tuning in to some kind of ontological truth or, you know, deeper reality, or that your brain is just fabricating it. Let’s say you experience, you know, unbounded awareness. You feel like, “Oh, I am just as vast as the universe.” But how do you know that’s not just your brain creating that subjective experience for you? And so, what he’s arguing essentially is that purely subjective means of gaining knowledge, such as meditation or other, you know, such methods, are not reliable because you can just be fooling yourself.
Edi: My overriding question to your very good atheist friend is, what do you mean by brain?
Rick: Okay.
Edi: I mean, this is not meant to be facetious. What do you mean by brain? Can I just explore this?
Rick: Sure.
Edi: Even in the 19th century, the great William James, the father of American psychology, said the dogma almost in psychology was thought is a function, a productive function of the brain. But then in his wonderful Ingersoll Lectures, William James, on human immortality, he asked what kind of a productive function, what do we mean by productive function? Well, there are three kinds. One is pure production. Steam is produced by a kettle. Electricity is produced by the generating station, yes, but there’s another kind of productive function which is permissive, releasing. The crossbow releases the arrow, it doesn’t produce the arrow. So it’s like a reducing valve that opens and closes and paradoxically and counterintuitively to most, when the brain is in its state of high activation, the reducing valve is closing, so there is very little creativity. It’s only in meditation and relaxation when the reducing valve opens to enable the permissive function, but the most important is transmissive, so the brain is not producing. It’s permitting and it’s transmitting. And here the great psychologist, as every great psychologist and scientist should do, he studied mystical poetry and literature because the great poets have really said it all. And here William James quotes from Shelley, the great English romantic poet, that life, like a dome of colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity. In other words, the brain acts rather like colored glass that refracts the light. So, life is the white radiance of eternity. And the more we fill our minds with concepts and prejudices, we, so to speak, enable the white light to refract through all the colored images and break up that image, that white light, into the various images. So the brain transduces and transmits. So we think through the brain, not with the brain. And the great Blavatsky, one of the principal founders of the Theosophical Society, put it so eloquently, in her imperious way, that if we regard the human being body as a mansion, then the brain is the door that looks out into the outside world. So the brain is the means whereby thought and rational intelligence are brought together, but in that mansion there are private doors, and through those private doors pass our feelings, our intuitions, and all of those depend on the soundness of the internal organic apparatus. So, to say it’s, in meditation, oh, it’s just produced by the brain. The brain is part of it, but it’s not producing it.
Rick: Okay, so I understand the point and the metaphor, and another good one is that the brain is like a radio transmitter/receiver, and, you know, it doesn’t create Beethoven or The Beatles or whatever, but it transmits a signal from a much broader field, you know, a ubiquitous field.
Edi: And the more you examine the grooves on your gramophone record or the pixels on your CD, the more you examine those, you’re not going to see the music or the composer.
Rick: Right.
Edi: So I say to neuroscientists, the more you look at the brain, the more you will understand the brain as the recording instrument.
Rick: But if we want to play with the scientists on their playing field, what can we say to them that would provide some kind of convincing evidence that the point you’re making has merit. That the brain is not just creating things but is more of a transmitter/receiver. Like near-death experiences are a possibility or psychic abilities are a possibility. There are various things where the brain is picking up things. We’re experiencing things we shouldn’t be able to experience but then they always either refuse to look at that evidence or they have some way of dismissing it because it threatens their paradigm.
Edi: Well, Rick, you can only do so much with someone who’s prepared to listen.
Rick: True. Yeah.
Edi: So the first point is the sensitivity of the individual. Scientists are creating increasingly sophisticated machines, telescopes, to look at the outer regions of the universe. And the latest one being talked about is the Einstein telescope. That’s fine, no problem. But what you get from those instruments is only as good as your sensitivity to see into it. So if Newton were looking through the telescope and I were looking through the same telescope, I think you can be pretty sure Newton would see further than I would. Not because his physical eyes were better than mine. No, his inner eyes. So, your answer, what can we do? We talk about sensitivity, but scientists are impregnated in the materialist ontology. Another thing you can do, and you can only deal with those who are undecided, is point out what the greatest of scientists, let alone others, have said about these higher realms. Schrödinger, in his book, What Is Life?, just there, when he said that the deepest truth from the Vedanta is “Atman equals Brahman”, the personal Self equals the omnipresent, all-abiding Self, the deepest truth of Indian philosophy is echoed by the mystics of all ages who have said with one voice, “I have become God.” Deus actus sum. “Become God” doesn’t mean I’m a god; it means I have united my personal Self with the all-encompassing, comprehending, omnipotent, omniscient Self. So I’ve removed the barriers that have separated me from the rest of the world. That’s the great heresy, the great heresy to think that I’m separate from you. But if that doesn’t convince the scientists, how about the great Sir Isaac Newton? One of the saddest things, in my opinion, Rick, it really pains me to dwell on how Newton has been misunderstood or misquoted. He was not the architect of the clockwork universe. Far from it. His works glow with reverence for divinity. So his Principia was only a mathematical description, and Newton clearly said it had nothing to do with real and physical causes, and he warns the reader and he asks the reader to beware that by using words like force and impulse, I mean those words only in the mathematical sense. So if these great scientists, the words of the great scientists, Newton, Einstein, Schrödinger, will not convince your scientists, well you’re wasting your time. Yeah, I mean, what else can I say? If someone comes to me for music lessons and says, “Well, I’m not deaf, am I interested?” Well, I’m wasting my time. But why are we doing this?
Rick: Yeah, who was it that said science progresses one funeral at a time?
Edi: One major funeral at a time and no weddings either.
Rick: Yeah, so it’s an interesting topic. I mean, the whole thing of-
Edi: Seriously, Rick, sorry to interrupt on this point.
Rick: That’s okay.
Edi: Many scientists are waking up to this. I mean I sounded a depressing note but I’m now going to sound a very bright note that through the wonderful work of the Galileo Commission and David Lorimer and Marjorie Woollacott, who are wonderful leaders, increasing numbers of scientists are now coming out of the closet. They were mainstream during the working week in the lab so as not to make fools of themselves in front of colleagues, but over the weekend they’ve come out of the closet. Now they’re rather more out of the closet and questioning the basis of mainstream science.
Rick: That’s good.
Edi: But yet people like Steven Weinberg, who has the audacity to say the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. So here, just to close this one out, what is life? What does he mean by “pointless”? He means “lifeless,” of course. So according to the NASA definition of life, life is a chemical system amenable to Darwinian evolution and the only thing we know on Earth. Now, the occultists, esotericists will say that just because you don’t see life in stones and other planets, you’ve got no right to say, therefore, that life doesn’t exist, any more than if I shut my curtains here, which I have done, I’ve got no right to say there’s nothing outside. Because for the esotericists and the occultists, universals, universal principles are far more significant than their appearance on the physical level because universals deal with the noumena, the causes, the invisible causes, and then the phenomena to breathe out are the physical effects on the physical plane. So, scientists need to get together with mystics and esotericists and get out of just the left brain.
Rick: I think it depends on how you define life. Was it David Lorimer or was it Rupert Sheldrake who wrote a book like, “Is the Sun Conscious?” or “Is the Sun Alive?”.
Edi: Of course it is.
Rick: Yeah, and that sounds absurd to the average person. There was a comedian here in the US that goes out on the street and like sticks a mic in people’s faces and asks them questions such as, “Who was the first man to walk on the sun?” And they think, “Um, gee, was it, um, you know, I don’t know.” They actually come up with some name overlooking the absurdity of the question. But obviously the most scientists would say it’s absurd to consider that there could be life in the sun, but it really depends on how we define life. And the way I would define it is that, if you look at anything closely, the sun, a pebble, you know, any inanimate object, you look at closely enough and you see that it’s just brimming with intelligence. The way a molecule functions is an expression of laws of nature which we don’t fully comprehend and that is happening in every cubic centimeter of the universe. So, it’s all life, it’s all God.
Edi: Yes, and what, as you say, is how you understand life. How can that which has illumined our planet and given us light, how can that not have life? How can we have life from something that is lifeless?
Rick: Well, the scientist is going to say it’s a fusion reaction. There’s no life there in any kind of biological sense, and he would be right about that. But again, you have to define life more deeply.
Edi: He would, but he would be right only at that level.
Rick: Right.
Edi: As Weinberg said, gone are the days when we celebrate the heavens with David, because now we know, look at the arrogance, now we know that the stars and the celestial bodies are nothing but glowing spheres of gas where the gravitational collapse of particles is supported by the upthrust from heat generated from thermonuclear fusion in the body of the star. So, that’s all it is. So, a celestial object has no more divinity than the stones on the ground in front of you.
Rick: Well, that’s true, but they both have divinity.
Edi: Exactly, yeah, and I would say using that analogy, the human body, if you squeeze it through a whatever, it’s mainly salt water. Does that mean that a human being of flesh and blood and spirit is nothing but a bucket of seawater?
Rick: Yeah, there’s a phrase for this that’s actually called “nothing but-ism.” You’ve probably heard that.
Edi: Yeah, nothing but-ism, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, if some of the listeners have questions about this, feel free to send them in, because unless you define your terms and your concepts carefully, this can sound like an absurd argument. You have to remember that we’re not defining life in the ordinary sense of just biological life, but rather in terms of the fact that intelligence is all-pervading and it pervades a stone as much as it pervades our body. These are just physical expressions that have different degrees of complexity and different functions.
Edi: Exactly. And you mentioned the physical body, Rick, let alone the subtle bodies.
Rick: Right.
Edi: Our physical body, as Ervin Laszlo, one of the greatest scientists, has pointed out, we have over a million billion cells in the human body alone, more than the stars in the Milky Way. Of that cell population, 600 billion cells are dying every day, and the same number are being regenerated, which makes around 10 million per second. Now, let’s just take that on board. rejuvenating. Yet, there is a master principle that holds the whole body together. What is that master principle? It’s important to ask the right question before trying to grab at an answer with the left brain. There is that master principle in terms of the occult philosophy, which is universal. There is the model body, the etheric double, the linga sharira, But that is subservient to a much higher principle. So each cell is like instruments of the orchestra playing the same music under the one conductor playing the same music composed by the one great composer who did not compose it just out of his head. He transmitted it through his being. So, even the human body is a mystery.
Rick: Incidentally, there’s some great videos you can find on YouTube that animate the mechanics, the inner workings of a cell, and they’re just totally fascinating, and you just… your jaw drops as you watch them to imagine that degree of complexity. Someone said that a typical cell is more complex than the city of Tokyo, and you just said we have a gazillion of of them in our bodies and millions of them are regenerating every second.
Edi: Iain McGilchrist, and few would argue with him, said it has not been possible, if I quote correctly, “to model even a single cell, so complex as it.”
Rick: Yeah, and to think that people believe that the whole thing is just some kind of random mechanism, that we’re biological robots in a meaningless universe. Now, I’ve had that argument with people and they say, “Well, there are laws of nature to explain all this stuff even if we don’t fully understand it, and if you would just grant us one miracle, which is that the laws of nature came into existence in the first place.” We don’t know how that happened, but if you grant us that, we can explain everything in terms of these laws of nature.
Edi: Yes, that’s the Rupert Sheldrake very amusingly slips that into his talks occasionally, quoting McKenna, I think, where he talks about the one free miracle. “Give us that one free miracle, the laws of nature, and we’ll explain everything else.” Well, it’s one hell of a free miracle, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Rick, these are all the grapplings of the left brain of the, if I may put it, the pygmy mind trying to access things that are way beyond its reach. The other, you know, this infinite monkey syndrome, which is the most stupid thing, if that infinite number of monkeys are a typewriter. But even if, just think of this, even if an infinite number of monkeys would type the complete works of Shakespeare, assume that, they would not be typing the complete works of Shakespeare. They would only be typing the words. The works of Shakespeare are the thought of the great man in words. Just putting a load of words down, if you put down the words, to be or not to be, blindly, doesn’t mean you understand it. So even that idiotic, infinite monkey syndrome argument one hears, “chance, chance,” doesn’t stack up.
Rick: Yeah. Why do you think that, like you said, it’s improving, people are coming out of the closet, but why do you think that many scientists, and perhaps the field in general still, predominantly, has been so closed-minded? And what are they afraid of?
Edi: Well, fear is a big thing. Fear stands at the back and the front of a lot of problems. A lot of people live in, and I include myself, of course, I mean it wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say not, in a Plato’s Cave, that wonderful allegory of the cave, Plato’s Cave, where the prisoners mistook the shadows on the wall for reality and only when they stepped outside they realized it was the shadow cast by the sun. So people like to be comfortable sitting in their armchair of conceptual thought. So to be knocked out of your armchair of security is uncomfortable. So that’s one reason, they want security. Mental closure, causal closure, that’s one reason. But there is another reason, Rick, and this is really to do with science and technology. The 19th century was a time of material exploration and research, and researching matter spilled into material development, which spilled over into a materialistic philosophy that everything could be explained on the basis of matter, given the spectacular advances and achievements in science. So, because so much can be explained on a materialist ontology, anything else is regarded as superfluous, and with this materialist ontology there is the overemphasis on primary qualities, that which you can measure, touch, see, and feel, as opposed to, or in contrast with, secondary qualities and qualia. So the two reasons are really the subjective need for security of the individual and the explosion in science and technology. Personally, speaking quite frankly, I’m very uncomfortable if I think I know it.
Rick: If you think you know what? Anything.
Edi: Well, if I think I know the full thing about anything, it makes me very uncomfortable. I want to know more. I want to be made uncomfortable, because you won’t explore and research if you think you know it all. And if you’re sitting in your materialistic armchair, thinking you know it all, Well, you don’t want someone to rock the boat. to rock the boat. I again emphasize, Rick, that I’m not knocking materialism in its proper place.
Rick: Right.
Edi: Our houses, our cars, our utilitarian devices, our medical technology depends on it. So it’s a different level.
Rick: Yeah, and if you think you know everything, or if you’re one of these people who say, “Well, this couldn’t be because we’ve already got that figured out,” you’re not a scientist.
Edi: No, well said.
Rick: You’re a sort of, what do they call, scientism.
Edi: Scientism, exactly so. How well that Bob Jahn, who was at Princeton running the PEAR, Princeton Anomalies Research Laboratories or Unit, which is now being taken over wonderfully by Jeff Dunn, his son, Brenda Dunn’s son, he mentions that he invited Philip Anderson, who was only a few corridors away from his room at Princeton, to see the results of his experiments on psychokinesis, how individuals can affect the readings of the various instruments. So if you have a beam of electrons, how individuals could bias it one way or another, for example. And Anderson said, “I don’t need to see it. I know it’s rubbish. I know it’s wrong.”
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Period.
Rick: Which is how the Galileo Commission got its name, you know? I mean, the church authorities wouldn’t look through Galileo’s telescope because Jupiter couldn’t have moons, you know? It conflicts with church dogma.
Edi: Yeah, so, exactly so. But when when Monteverde was invited, I believe, by Galileo, to look through the telescope, Monteverde obviously saw physical stars, but he saw more. And he wrote his beautiful music, The Vespers, where he saw the divinity in the stars. So sensitivity.
Rick: Yeah. Now I guess we could say, you would probably agree, that the general…well, let me put this is a couple of different ways…sometimes I would put it this way. If we look around the world at the condition of society and all the different factors, the economies, the ecology, the technologies, everything else, it’s all an expression of human consciousness. It’s a reflection of the collective consciousness of humanity through its various influential means, the greatest of which is science. So all the bridges, the airplanes, most of the environmental pollution, all that are the sort of spin-offs or symptoms of various technologies that we’ve been applying. And a lot of people, like I just watched a documentary with Bill Gates, and he was talking about geo-engineering and ways of combating climate change by sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere. So people are coming up with ideas for using more science to correct things and of that might be very good, and it might be necessary, but could you, like, kind of imagine for us what you think the world might look like if science and spirituality were working hand in hand and had fully blossomed to a great, high level of their potential? Yeah, I guess that’s good enough as a question there.
Edi: That would be heaven on earth, Rick.
Rick: Yeah, and how would it come about? Like all the nitty-gritty problems, the diseases, everything else that we rely on science to deal with, how would the infusion of spirituality enable us to actually solve these problems?
Edi: Spirituality, in the broader sense, is the recognition of divinity in each person. So it would, for a start, result in intense cooperation rather than ruthless competition. I think the best thing I can do is to give you an example of the great Florence Nightingale. Now I think not many people know that she was a tremendous statistician, besides being a phenomenal healer and a nurse, of course, and she was able to see patterns in statistics that others couldn’t, but from her life experience, and you couldn’t have someone more involved with human suffering than a nurse during the Crimean War, and she came to three fundamental, conclusions is the wrong word, “insights”. She said that our physical laws of science are really the expression of a higher intelligenc
Edi: secondly, that each person has that seed or spark of divinity in them; and thirdly, through evolution, each person will come to realize their innate divinity. But then going on, she said that praying for miracles is not the answer. If you’re pouring sewage into the River Thames, you don’t pray to God to take cholera away. You clean up the sewage. So here you have the most practical example of a spiritual beacon and a scientific mind. So if science and spirituality work together, we would have literally utopia on earth. But for that to happen, there has to be a radical shift in our sense of values. We have now what Dr. Joan Walton, another wonderful lady in the scientific medical, the acting chairman no less, and a great educationalist, she refers to as an ontological crisis where everything ultimately is to do with matter, physical matter. But I say not only that, we have a crisis of values. Look at the people whom we look up to. If a man is a billionaire, he automatically commands respect and adulation. you only have to look at the billionaires around. Now I’m saying there’s a big difference between the cultured philanthropist and the ruffian billionaire. So our sense of values is entirely driven by he who has the most money, the most power, and the greatest position and control. And I’m saying that someone who misuses his power is a weak person. So from the spiritual point of view, all the tyrants of this world, we needn’t name them, there are enough of them, they are weak people because they have no power over themselves, and the only person worth having power over is yourself. And when you can handle power wisely, then you can deal with the world around. So these are all facets that interlock. Just because a man is a billionaire, why is he allowed to tell lies? Why is it okay to tell lies if you’re a billionaire? If I told lies at work, I’d be out of my job. Why is it okay to tell lies if I’m a powerful billionaire? That’s a distorted sense of values. So if science and spirituality danced together, our value system would go up a grade and our moral compass, the needle, would be where it’s meant to be. As Albert Schweitzer said so beautifully, that there are three things necessary for progress. Progress in science and technology, of course. Progress in socialization, social interaction. The most important is progress in spirituality. And here, the great Schweitzer was doing nothing more than emphasizing the three levels of our being – body, soul, and spirit. On Earth, we live in three bodies. Depending on our inclination, one or the other predominates, but those three have to be held in balance. And when science and spirituality come together, science will look on the world from a higher standpoint.
Rick: Ah, great points there, many of which we could discuss at greater length, and perhaps we’ll have time to. I’ll get back to the Florence Nightingale quote about the laws of nature. Repeat it for me, the laws of nature are… Yeah.
Edi: The physical laws of nature which science has discovered and which underpin our physical universe are the expression and creation, if you like, of a higher intelligence.
Rick: Right, and you know, the reason that really caught my interest is that, you know, obviously the people who have discovered these laws of nature and who have wielded them through various technologies have not reached their full potential as human beings, or unfolded the full possibility of consciousness within themselves, and therefore, they can’t help but misapply the laws of nature or apply them in ways that are, you know, a mixed blessing.
Edi: Mixed blessing.
Rick: Yeah, and so this might help us understand how, if the custodians of science and technology were highly enlightened individuals, then the divine intelligence that flowed through them and enabled them to have their understanding of the laws of nature and devise technologies that apply those laws of nature would be much more full and holistic, and therefore the technologies would be much less of a mixed blessing, perhaps, you know, 99% blessing. And, yeah, and so we can understand through that how development of spirituality alongside consciousness might transform the world.
Edi: Yes, and this might rub a few noses the wrong way, or whatever the expression is among scientists, but science in a true sense doesn’t explain. And this was said very forcefully by Arthur Thompson, who is none other than a Fellow of the Royal Society. Science describes to wonderful effect. So take, for example, the human eye. Why does the cornea have no blood supply? Because if it did have a blood supply, the light wouldn’t get through. Blood cells are red.
Rick: Right.
Edi: Now, science has discovered that to tremendous effect, and I speak as someone with corneal trouble, hence my contact lenses. But that does not explain it. It’s a discovery. Science has discovered, still talking of the human eye, many other things, why the cells at the back of the eye have this pumping action to expel water molecules. Because if water ingested the back of the cornea, it’d be like driving your car with a misty windscreen. So there is this pumping action. That’s a discovery. Who designed it? Now, if we think of the laws of physics, Bernoulli’s Law, the fact that you and I go in airplanes is thanks to the discovery by Bernoulli and Newton that this aerofoil lift. No scientist sat down in his laboratory and designed the human eye, or designed or invented Bernoulli’s Law. They discovered it. So, a bit of humility, please, Mr. Scientist.
Rick: Yeah, now probably a scientist would say, “Well, the reason Bernoulli’s Law was discovered is that we observed the way bird wings are.”
Edi: Exactly.
Rick: Or the reason the eye works the way you just described is Darwinian evolution, and through countless generations, eyes developed because certain models of the eye worked better than other models, and so those people were able to, or those beings were able to reproduce and survive, and so that’s why we ended up with the eyes we have, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just all…
Edi: Right, Darwinian evolution, in very simple terms, the two pillars of the Neo-Darwinian spontaneous mutation and natural selection chooses from that pool of genes that which is most favorable to the survival of the species. Who is doing the selection in the natural selection? Can they not see that the eye has a purpose? There is teleology, scientists hate the word teleology of course, which is goal-orientated purpose. Natural selection, but why just the eye to be transparent? Who decided that the human being needs a transparent cornea in order to see? That lovely saying, if the eye were not of the nature of light, it could not perceive light.
Rick: Well I’m not going to play devil’s advocate too much because I’m on the same page with you but I think…
Edi: Well that’s important.
Rick: Yeah, I think a scientist might say there didn’t need to be anybody to decide, it’s just worked out that certain eyeball designs were more favorable to life and therefore those designs survived and others went extinct.
Edi: What kind of life? Why human life? The fruit fly has eyes of a very different shape.
Rick: Sure, which works well for a fruit fly. We wouldn’t want those eyes, nor would he want ours.
Edi: But works well for a fruit fly means what? It means that the fruit fly has a certain direction for its life. It’s going in a certain direction, and so it needs those kind of eyes.
Rick: Yeah, and so what you and I are agreeing on here is that, and probably most of our audience, is that there’s some kind of intelligent design going on, not necessarily in the way that fundamentalist Christian design is defined.
Edi: Oh, definitely not. No, not at all.
Rick: But that there is some intelligence guiding all this. It’s this, you know, random mutation is not ultimately random. There is a kind of an evolutionary force that guides the universe, that has taken us from hydrogen to Mozart, and that it’s not just the possibility of it all happening by chance is nil. I mean, you’ve probably heard of, what is it, biocentrism, or the notion of all those constants that if any of them were ever so slightly different, we wouldn’t have a universe, or there couldn’t be life in it.
Edi: Yes. If any of the fundamental constants were out by even a fraction of a percent, we would either have a soup or a non-existing universe. And the multiverse is the only thing that comes as close as it can to the occult doctrine of cyclic evolution. The multiverse, where the constants in the other universes could be very different from that which was responsible for our universe. And of course, we can never measure that or look through a telescope because it’s outside the physical. However, Stephen Hawking, in his last paper, which I have, he provided mathematical evidence for the multiverse, and that is a tremendous contribution.
Rick: Yeah, but of course, the multiverse concept is used as a cop-out by materialists who say, “Okay, well, there’s countless universes and we just happen to be in the one that lucked out, you know, with all the constants in perfect attunement, and the other ones are all probably duds, so that kind of excuses them from having to admit that there’s some kind of intelligence guiding our universe.
Edi: Yeah, of course, people are always looking for an excuse to justify their own particular point of view.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, so I ended up doing what I said I wasn’t going to do, which was just wing it, but I want to get down to your notes here and make sure we’re covering all the bases. So a lot of it we have already covered. I’m just going to skim here. We’ve talked about the limitations of science and we’ve talked about the societal implications of its limitations and the necessity for spiritual awakening. We’ve talked a bit about the brain generating consciousness versus being a transmitter/receiver of consciousness. And interject here as I say this, if there’s anything you think we didn’t cover enough. And we’ve talked about the sort of rigidity and closed-mindedness of mainstream science in accepting these perspectives that you and I are agreeing on. We talked a little bit about Darwin just now, and maybe we could talk a bit about him, in that, you know, Darwinian theory is considered unquestionable doctrine and it’s, you know, as well established as the law of gravity or whatever, and/or the shape of the earth, which of course some people do question, nuttily. But is there anything more we want to say about the theory of evolution as kind of, yeah, go ahead.
Edi: Let’s just say this, that however far you want to take it up, life is always the interplay of spirit and matter. By that I mean, the animating impulse and the medium through which it acts. So, in the most simplistic way, if we think of current along an electrical wire, the current would be the spirit aspect, but it would be an abstraction because it needs matter, the conductor, to actuate it. If you just have the bare conductor, it’s impotent. So, you always have the animating impulse and the vehicle through which it acts. Science only looks to the vehicle, to the matter, to the forms, so forms will always change. Science does not look at the animating impulse, the life, the vitality behind the forms. So science regards evolution as the changing of form, but it does not see the changing of form as the result of something that’s making that change. So, there is not only evolution, there is involution, and there is devolution as well. So, “evolution” – “e volvere” – means the unfolding of the innate potential that has been trapped. So, evolution in philosophical terms is the releasing of spirit congealed in matter. Involution is the privation of spirit in matter, and spirit and matter are relative terms, of course. So, science needs to think of involution as well as evolution, and not just see evolution as the changing of outer form.
Rick: Clarify a little bit more what you mean by involution?
Edi: Involution, to involve. So, a spirit which naturally wishes to expand when it is held back, when it is congealed. If you think of E=mc², m matter is the involution of light. Light has been imprisoned, and no one put it better than the great Sir James Jeans when he spoke of matter as crystallized light. So, light has been imprisoned, involved. Evolution would be the releasing from that privation.
Rick: Yeah, and it seems to me that involution happens through evolution. In other words…
Edi: They always go together.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Edi: Yes.
Rick: The vehicle evolves in order to…
Edi: To start, the origin of the species is not the origin. It’s a certain point in time.
Rick: Okay, good. And so, I kind of interrupted you for that definition, but I don’t know if you finished the point you were trying to make about Darwin?
Edi: No, Darwin, we don’t, we meaning the occultists, the esotericists, do not deny Darwin, but Darwin is only a small part of the overall picture. To start, the origin of the species is not the origin, it’s a certain point in time. And there is also the evolution, not just of matter, but there is the evolution of the psyche as well, and the spiritual nature, not just the physical. But bear in mind that Darwin got a first degree in theology, excuse me, not science, at Cambridge, first degree in theology. And his great, his wonderful, well, collaborator for a while, Wallace openly said that the explosion in mathematical ability that we see in his time could not possibly be explained purely on the basis of natural selection, and that was someone who co-authored a paper with Darwin. So, we’re not saying Darwin’s right or wrong; these are silly words. It is limited. And what we find, Rick, just to take this further, because this is a really important point. We see that nature always evinces a march towards a higher order of existence. So, for example, the mineral wants to become the vegetable, wants to become the animal, wants to become the human, who wants to become something much more than human. Now, no one put it more beautifully than the great Iranian Sufi master, Suhrawardi. Let’s give Iran some credit. I mean, it’s really going through a hell of a time now. The great Iranian masters, light and internal light. The external light illumines everything, without which, obviously, there’d be no life. The internal light is the impulse in every being to realize its true origins, to, as Suhrawardi put it so beautifully, “unite with the beloved.” So, the mineral can’t become a human in one jump. The mineral kingdom, in order to unite with the beloved, has to go through the vegetable kingdom. It’s important to think of kingdoms of nature, and the vegetable kingdom becomes the animal, and the human, humanity, is a kingdom of nature. So, what we find in evolution is downward links of love and sacrifice from the higher kingdom and upward links of reverence and obedience, where the higher kingdom, so to speak, enables the lower to ascend higher, the purpose being to unite with the source in full consciousness. We’ve given Iran credit, for goodness sake, let’s give Lebanon some credit, the great Kahlil Gibran, that life goes in search of life in bodies that fear the grave. So, the bodies, the material principle, the form, will change. Anything that is to do with form and matter, by definition almost, is impermanent. That will change and decay so that life may inhabit a newer form, a more complex form that will better express its innate potential.
Rick: You probably know that…
Edi: Let’s just now end with Rumi, who said the whole of evolution in life shows the principle of dying for the sake of life, the changing in form for the sake of the indwelling life. But science only looks at the change in form and calls that evolution.
Rick: You probably know the author of this, “God sleeps in the rock, stirs in the plant…”
Edi: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: No, “dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakes in the human being.” Who said that?
Edi: I think Rumi, it’s credited to Rumi, but there are slight variations on that.
Rick: Right.
Edi: But the great Rumi as well.
Rick: Right. Which, you know, if we just repeat that one more time, we’re talking about God being the indweller in all these life forms and just taking on fuller and fuller, taking on bodies which enable fuller and fuller expression of that divine intelligence.
Edi: More technically, the monad, one of the fundamental precepts of occultism and theosophy, is the journey of the eternal pilgrim, which is the monad, that spiritual impulse that goes through that cyclic journey in order to understand its own divinity in full consciousness. Yes.
Rick: One of the things I’ve heard you talk about, and I’m sure it’s in your book too, is these wealthy people who want to achieve immortality by having their bodies frozen, or having chips implanted, or having their mind uploaded to the Cloud, or you know, these various things, which always seemed absurd to me. It seemed that to me that they just really didn’t have any idea of the thing you were just alluding to of evolution through upgrading the vehicle periodically.
Edi: Yeah, and here one needs to point out one of the warnings of the great philosopher Paul Brunton, and my gosh was he a tremendous human being, and he said that science, meaning modern science, used wisely will result in the physical release of man. Well, of course, we’ve seen hygiene and electricity and cars and medical science. Science used unwisely will result in his downfall, which is exactly what you’ve mentioned. It is a total philosophical nonsense to think that you can freeze the body and then recover the consciousness by downloading your previous brainwaves into a computer. But all of this is taken very seriously, which is very sad, by academia. There is, at Oxford University the James Martin fellow, Anders Sandberg, who is a committed transhumanist, I heard him on the radio, and they’re really promulgating all of this. It’s a complete identification of life with the physical body. And of course, if life is nothing but the physical body, the billionaire wants to wake up after being frozen and reunite with his yacht, and his mansion and his peacock throne. We who know better might refer to that wonderful letter that the 31-year-old Mozart wrote to his father, that every day when, I’m paraphrasing, when I wake up, I realize that death, far from being something to fear, is now my best friend.
Rick: A couple of reincarnation jokes here. I saw one where there’s this cartoon, the guy’s standing in front of a bank and it said, “First Reincarnation Bank. You can’t take it with you, so leave it with us until you return.” And then the other one was a tombstone. It said, “I’ll be back. Don’t touch my stuff.” But anyway, I mean, what you’re talking about, these cryogenesis or whatever they call themselves.
Edi: Cryonics. And some of them have frozen their pets. Some have just frozen the head and the nervous system, whatever that means. But talking of the bank, rather than taking your money, you do take your spiritual treasures. You do.
Rick: Sure, yeah.
Edi: You take your spiritual treasures. And the other thing you mentioned with the bank and…
Rick: The tombstone. Don’t touch my stuff, I’ll be back.
Edi: Yeah, your body can be a tombstone, which is one of the tarot symbols, or your body can be a temple.
Rick: Yeah, I mean this freezing your body thing, it’s almost as absurd as freezing your car, you know, hoping that you can thaw it out in 50 years when they have better car mechanics or something like that. It just sort of obviously denies an understanding of reincarnation, which to me is like, you know, kind of a basic assumption. A couple of questions came in from somebody. Let’s take a look at those. It’s my email. Okay, here we go. Well, they both seem to be from someone named Ramanama Who, so he’s a bit of a jokester, in the UK. The first question. There are three teachings – religion, science, and spirituality. If your understanding can concur with all three, would this not be a greater understanding than just one or two? Yeah, I think we’ve been discussing that for an hour, right?
Edi: I mentioned Albert Schweitzer’s quotation, which is exactly on that theme. So that’s an important point. Let me just deal with this. Science enables us to live efficiently, religion to live morally, and spirituality and philosophy to live ethically. So we need all of these three things. So putting it in a journey terms, in terms of a journey, philosophy shows us the great overall plan. Well, that’s all very well, how do you go up the mountain? Religion will point a path up that mountain, whichever your religion is, they all come to the top. But how do I do the walking? Science provides the means and the productive assistance.
Rick: How do you distinguish between morals and ethics?
Edi: Yeah, well, I’ve thought of that a lot. If you think of your car, if I drive my car when I’m drunk, I’ve never been drunk even as a student, I’m proud to say, it’s the only thing I boast about, that’s a pretty immoral thing to do. It’s not unethical. But if I’m fully, you know, full consciousness, and my exhaust is belching out smoke into the atmosphere, that’s unethical. It’s polluting. But also, if I’m driving my car in first gear, screaming along at 50 miles an hour, that’s not very efficient. So you have the efficient, the moral, and the ethical. The two, though, they do coalesce. I mean, being unfaithful to someone is not unethical, it’s immoral.
Rick: I’ll have to study this, because I’m not completely clear on the distinction and the degree of overlap, but I help to establish…
Edi: There’s a lot of overlap.
Rick: I’m sorry, what again?
Edi: There’s a lot of overlap. And words are in borderless touch.
Rick: I helped to establish an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which you might be interested in. We have over 700 members now and over 50 member organizations. So all this stuff, and the reason we established it was there has been so much misbehavior among spiritual teachers, which considering how much emphasis we’ve put today on the importance of spirituality in the world is a rather serious form of sabotage, in my opinion. So anyway, but I really should better understand the distinction between those two terms. I’ve heard of a certain presidential candidate being described as ethically and morally bankrupt, and I was thinking, is that not redundant? I really need to look into those two words.
Edi: If we don’t, how can I put it, if we don’t recycle our rubbish and plastics and just dump it, it’s also immoral, it’s an unethical thing to do. It’s a disservice to the planet. So I mean, it is a bit of a fine distinction, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, anyway, something to think about.
Edi: And a lot of overlap, as you said.
Rick: Okay, so we have a second question here by that Ramananamala guy, which is, “Can we agree that a world without God, intelligence, would not work? The following statement is my mantra, ‘God is all that exists. God is existence. Nothing exists that is not God.'”
Edi: Yes, fully agree. As long as, please, we do not limit God to an anthropomorphic concept. We regard God, deity, as the universal intelligence and power.
Rick: Right. We’re not talking about big guy in the sky with a beard.
Edi: No, of course not. Which the great Newton wrote about so eloquently in the General Scholium of Principia, when he describes God as duration, space, eternity, as a blind man cannot see colors, says Newton, so also we have no idea about the shape and form of God, but he is without shape and form. The three pages of Newton’s General Scholium will say it all.
Rick: Yeah, I would also say that he is all shapes and forms, and we shouldn’t be saying he here.
Edi: He’s no particular shape and form. We just say he.
Rick: I know, I’ve gotten flack for using the male pronoun here. But you know, my camera is God, the wall is God, my thumb is God, in the sense that it’s all, that if God is omnipresent, which I think most religions consider it to be, then we’re looking at it. You know, it’s staring us in the face.
Edi: Yeah.
Rick: Hiding in plain sight.
Edi: Putting it another way, every particle, every quark, every microparticle, the innermost center of it, is spirit.
Rick: Yeah. And even possibly the outer crust. I mean, if you think about, let’s say, my thumb, it’s – here it is, where’s my thumb? Okay. On a certain level it’s flesh, and then it’s carbon, and then it’s atoms, and then it’s quarks, and so on. But that’s just because we’re getting more microscopic. I mean, if it’s ultimately – we get down to pure intelligence or consciousness, isn’t it that from top to bottom? And it just appears to be something other than that if we look at it superficially.
Edi: Superficially, it is an appearance, and of course it is.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: But ultimately, it is the appearance of an intelligence. So, in terms of spirit and matter, and consciousness and matter, consciousness expresses not in matter, it expresses as matter. As matter, so as the great Max Planck put it, you know, great founder of quantum mechanics, that he said, “As a man who’s devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, I can tell you there’s no such thing as matter. There is only force, and matter is the outer skin of force, the appearance of force, so to speak.”
Rick: Yeah, like we might say, there’s not water in clouds. Clouds are water, appearing as clouds.
Edi: Yeah, exactly. The rainbow is not in the sky. It is the water droplets.
Rick: Right, or light refracting through them.
Edi: But you mentioned clouds, Rick. This is an important point that just comes to me. One of the reasons why there’s this confusion. We confuse the objective with the phenomena. Now, here is a glass. I mean, it’s an objective thing. You can pour water into it. A rainbow is not an object. You can’t put a rainbow in a box. A rainbow is a phenomena, which is the result of the optical apparatus of the eyes, the nervous system of the brain, the mind that sees the pictures, and the water droplets in the clouds. So if you go up in a hot air balloon where you wouldn’t even melt the droplets, but if you went up you wouldn’t touch a rainbow, you’d be touching water droplets. So rainbows are phenomena and one of the reasons for the confusion we see around us is mistaking an object with a phenomena.
Rick: Good. So, we talked a little bit about reincarnation, and there’s also the concept of karma, which I think it’s part of the puzzle, and it’s like a necessary cog in the machine. If you leave that cog out, the machine doesn’t work. So…
Edi: It’s the most important cog, Rick.
Rick: Yeah, so let’s discuss that a little bit, and the implications of it and how it would work actually if there is karma that kind of helps to organize the universe and that could carry over from life to life and how complex must that be in order for all those little, all the details to be worked out?
Edi: Well, the etymology of karma is kri, which is to do, to act, to make action. And if science would take one thing on board philosophically, it should be to understand karma, the implication of what they’re doing. Action and reaction, and these are all simplistic terms, but science provides good similes, good analogies. So, Newton’s second law is the most simple action and reaction. A more useful analogy is Le Chatelier’s principle in chemistry, whereby any system in equilibrium, in dynamic equilibrium, if it is disturbed, the system will take up a new equilibrium position to try and counteract the disturbing force, and in so doing it would give out heat or take in heat. So, if we regard the whole of the universe, the whole of humanity, as a tremendous dynamic system, any disturbance will result in a new position of equilibrium. Now karma, there are basically four aspects to it in terms of the human being. One is Sanchita Karma, that’s the totality of all your karmas. The other one…
Rick: From all your lives.
Edi: Exactly so. The other is Prarabdha Karma, the karma for this life. The third one is…
Rick: Excuse me, meaning the karma you have brought into this particular life?
Edi: Yes, the karma that is allocated to your life.
Rick: Like a bucket out of the mountain, okay.
Edi: Well said, yes. And well said, because if all your karmas were dumped into the one bucket, you just would explode. So, you can only handle so much. The third one is Kriyamana, which is the karma of immediate actions, and the fourth one is called Agami, which is…
Rick: So, Kriyamana means the karma you’re creating as you go along?
Edi: Yes.
Rick: Like if I do something this afternoon, I’m creating a fresh karma?
Edi: Yes, precisely.
Rick: Okay, good.
Edi: And Agami is the karma that’s sent along to another life.
Rick: Okay.
Edi: Now, dealing with karma, which is a phenomenal subject, the issue of time comes in. When one gets the karmic download depends on your stage on the spiritual ladder of evolution. So what I mean is the more one takes spirituality seriously, the more there will be the karmic download because one can’t advance without cleansing what has to be, well, cleaned out of the way.
Rick: Yeah, as a teacher of mine once said, “When the postman knows you’re gonna move, he tries to deliver all your mail.”
Edi: Yeah, I like that. That’s brilliant. Yeah. So, if one takes spirituality seriously, one has invoked the divine light as witness to search out all your dark areas and corners, which in ordinary life, well, they’re there, but if you invoke that light, it will search out every dark corner, which is why it is said even a little attention to spirituality and occult science will create a huge karmic download. That does not mean karma is punishment. Far from it. It is a law of love, seriously, because without that offloading of impediments that are no longer serving you, you can’t move on. In terms of reincarnation, there is that glorious phrase in ‘Light on the Path’ by Sir Edwin Arnold, that “who toiled a slave may yet be born a prince, for worthy deeds done and merits won; who ruled a king might wander the earth in rags for deeds done and undone.” I would like to say this to some people in some parts of the world who are aspiring to the top job.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: In America as well.
Rick: I know what you’re implying. It’s a scary time.
Edi: So it’s an enormous subject. Yeah. The more scientists are sensitive to the results of their behavior, then as you said earlier, science and spirituality will come together.
Rick: Yeah. Now what you’re saying here about karmic download, are you saying that if a person embarks on the spiritual path, that they’re gonna, like, you know, face a shitload of karma, to use a crude term, that things are just gonna start coming at ’em, and life in a way is going to get more difficult because of all the stuff they have to clear out.
Edi: In many ways, yes. So, what is happening is it’s accentuating all the negative traits, but also all the positive traits. So that searchlight, in fact, what Yogananda said is initially we have a 60-watt light bulb in us, so to speak, but by embarking on Kriyamana Yoga and other practices, you’re putting in a 6-billion-watt light bulb in you. So that will certainly, if your body and your personality can’t handle it, it’ll create no end of havoc.
Rick: Right, but I think that’s why the spiritual traditions advocate, you know, various practices to purify the vehicle.
Edi: Precisely.
Rick: You know, so you’re not trying to put too much voltage through an inadequate-
Edi: Precisely, sir. Precisely. Exactly.
Rick: Right. And if you handle that correctly, you can, it can be a pretty smooth ride. I mean, in my experience, my life was very difficult before I got onto spirituality at the age of 18. I had dropped out of school and was doing drugs and all kinds of things. But then, you know, it got better and better once I had learned to meditate. And obviously, there have been all kinds of ups and downs and all sorts of challenges and things, you know, that I had to undergo. But I wouldn’t have traded that at any point for what my life had been like earlier.
Edi: Yeah, so you’re developing your spiritual muscles sensibly rather than trying to jump too far.
Rick: Yeah, I didn’t expect to accomplish it all in a weekend or something. Yeah, it’s a lifelong journey in my opinion, or a lives-long journey. Okay, so still on the subject of karma, you know, people ask questions like, “Alright, Let’s say there’s a big plane crash, or let’s say that a whole city is bombed, or everybody on the Titanic goes down. How do you explain that all those diverse different people had the confluence of karma to undergo the same disaster? Or the Holocaust in Nazi Germany or something like that, or what’s happening in Gaza today? Is that the fault of the kids that are being bombed? There’s all kinds of tricky questions.
Edi: There are enormous issues and the first thing I would say is to admit how little one knows. So to say for example that all those young children and babies in the Hiroshima bombing, it was their karma, is the most brutal, callous, stupid thing to say. There is a lot we don’t know. And it always strikes me that it is innocent people, innocent citizens, who bear the brunt of the brutality of the dictators. It’s not good enough to say it’s their karma, that’s just using words. It’s much better to say, “I don’t know, and I will try and find out.” But if I understand karma, at least on the lower level, at my own personal level, it might provide some insight into the greater picture. But ultimately, Rick, there is only collective karma. If I throw the rubbish out of my house, it’s not just my garden that gets polluted; the whole street is affected. So, there is collective karma, and that is part of our national karma, which is part of our individual karma. So, before trying to understand why all these unfortunate incidents occur in other people’s lives, if one focuses dispassionately on one’s own actions and life, that might provide the insight into the wider picture.
Rick: Yeah. It’s worth mentioning that in the Bhagavad Gita, you know, Krishna says that the mechanics of karma are unfathomable by human intellect. It’s just too vastly complex.
Edi: Yeah, and it is also said that in order really to understand karma, you’ve got to be above the laws of karma. And this means that one has reached the stage of the bodhisattva or the nirmanakaya, those who have gone beyond the human state.
Rick: Yeah, I once asked a guru about omniscience and he said it’s not possible for human nervous systems, they’re too crude. You need a celestial nervous system to have omniscience. Another question came in. Let’s see what that is. This is from Rita Sponenberg from somewhere in the U.S. “Science and spirituality need to work together, but scientists believe they’re incompatible. However, militant religious spirituality also thinks they are incompatible and chooses dogmatic beliefs instead of progressing beyond them. They are equally problematic in achieving that world you described.
Edi: Well, if people want to take fixed positions, there’s nothing one can do to dissolve those boundaries other than let time be the great healer.
Rick: Yeah, I think that quote from Aldous Huxley about the working hypothesis, I think if everyone could take everything as a working hypothesis and not as an absolute that they had to defend with their lives or other people’s lives, we’d all get along a lot better.
Edi: A working hypothesis that you take on board, you test it, you experiment with it, and then you see what’s happening.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: That’s how science works and should work.
Rick: Should work.
Edi: Yeah.
Rick: And that’s how religion could work, and that’s how I think some of the more evolved religions have worked.
Edi: Yeah, exactly. And also, let’s make the point, the strong point, that the religious precepts are not just said by way of a belief system, they were said out of experience. The Buddha didn’t attend, he didn’t have a PhD in religion and philosophy, he spoke from experience. The Christ didn’t go to a theological college, he spoke from experience. So, religion has nothing to do with belief, really. Nothing to do with belief. It is experience.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Which then gets dogmatized into a belief.
Rick: Right. Oprah Winfrey once asked Eckhart Tolle to complete the sentence, “I believe…” and he said, “Nothing in particular.”
Edi: Or everything.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean the whole notion of belief to me is, I mean there’s all kinds of things you and I both believe, but we certainly wouldn’t kill anybody over them or anything because we might be wrong, or you know, maybe their beliefs, if different, are still as valid as ours. Yeah, again, beliefs are working hypotheses.
Edi: Belief and conviction are different.
Rick: Yes.
Edi: We have convictions, but beliefs are not to be entertained, other than as a working hypothesis, as you said.
Rick: Right, and even convictions, I think, should be held lightly.
Edi: Yes, yes, most certainly.
Rick: Okay, so what are some of the major themes of your book which we haven’t touched upon, which you feel would be important to mention?
Edi: Oh my goodness, one I would say is the mystery teachings.
Rick: Okay.
Edi: What I call the mystery teachings. Now quickly let me just explain, define. You have, they’re not mysteries as such, but they’re given out to worthy candidates, so to speak. So you have mysticism, you have esoteric science, and you have occult science. So the mystic would be very much in tune with the whole world and whole universe, and he would see the boundaries between himself and the other person dissolving, so to speak. But then when the mystic becomes dissatisfied and hungry for more, he wants more knowledge, then in comes esoteric science where he wants to learn about the inner workings of nature. But then he knows about the inner workings of nature, but how do I use those hidden laws? Then he becomes the occultist. So, to use a musical analogy, if I’m very musical and I love music, I’m like the mystic, but then I want to learn about the composers and learn music theory, then I’m the esotericist. And then when I want to function as a performer, I become an occultist. So occult science is to do with function, esoteric science is to do with meaning and system.
Rick: Okay, so if I could repeat that to make sure I understood what you said. So, the mystic might have some profound inner experiences, but they don’t necessarily reveal to him the mechanics of nature. So, he could then study and on the basis of his experience, or supplemented by it or enriched by it, he could come to understand the mechanics of nature, but that doesn’t necessarily enable him to do anything with that understanding.
Edi: Absolutely not.
Rick: And then the next stage would be to actually apply it and have an impact on the world.
Edi: Exactly. Yeah. So, that’s why the mystery teachings were always in three grades, the lesser mysteries, the middle ones, and the greater mysteries in the Greek, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Orphic, and the Dionysian. So, what we haven’t touched on in terms of the mystery teachings is the incredible power of symbolism. So, just one story, people wonder why is there so much evil? Well, the story of the god Bacchus, otherwise Dionysus, the god Bacchus was torn to pieces by the Titans who then scattered the body of the god far and wide, and Jupiter, the father, Bacchus, beholding the crime, hurled his thunderbolt at the Titans and reduced their bodies to ashes. But from the ashes, which contained a portion of the Bacchic body that the Titans had devoured, the human race was created, which is why the human being is part God and part Titan/Devil. So each human being, if he wants proof of God and Devil, I’d say just look at yourself in the mirror. The proportions vary, but unless you are a total monster or a sage, you will see both God and Devil. So the ashes contained a part of the godly body that the Titans had devoured and the human being was created from those ashes. So, we are part Bacchus, the Bacchic god, and we are part Titan. And the other point is, how did the Titans ensnare Bacchus, the god? By getting him to be enamored with his own image in the mirror, which signifies getting engrossed in a sea of Maya. Maya, the things are not what they appear to be. So we are so engrossed with ourselves, go on a holiday and you see how people love their selfies. We are so engrossed with themselves.
Rick: Take pictures of their lunch.
Edi: Yeah, but again, yeah, on a more serious note, this is why the Greeks and all traditions, all traditions forbade suicide, because suicide is an act of violence against the God within. Now, I know there are all sorts of reasons behind suicide, and the after-death states depend on the motive behind it, but in general, it’s not to be recommended. It’s an act of violence against the God within.
Rick: And it’s also a missed opportunity, because human life is precious, and the opportunity for spiritual evolution in a human life is perhaps rare and certainly great.
Edi: Sure, but of course there are circumstances.
Rick: Sure, there are. Here’s a question from Kanta Dadleni in, I believe she’s in Mumbai. “Why would supreme consciousness as we understand it manifest in its manifold forms for them to undergo experiences?”
Edi: Did I hear from Mumbai?
Rick: I think she’s from Mumbai.
Edi: No, that’s where I was born.
Rick: Oh, cool. Yeah, nice.
Edi: Why would spiritual-
Rick: I can read it again. “Why would supreme consciousness, as we understand it, manifest in its manifold forms for them, meaning the forms, to undergo experiences?” I mean, what’s in it for God, I guess she’s saying?
Edi: Love. Let me try and explain this. The great Schiller, who Beethoven immortalized in his Ode to Joy, Schiller actually said that the universe is a thought of deity, supreme consciousness, and since this ideal thought form has over spilled into what we call reality, it is the calling of all thinking beings to try and discover the original design. So, the Supreme Consciousness, out of its sheer love, wants to radiate and emanate. So, if we see love as a principle of light and radiation, which is inherent within the nature of the Supreme Consciousness, it must unfold and create expressions of its own self on different levels. So, for example, in the Kabbalah, we have the unmanifest world, ‘Ayin’, which is pure darkness. Then the next step is ‘Ein Sow’, the awakening, and then ‘Ein Son Our’, the boundless light, the unmanifest worlds, like when we sleep. We sleep, we awaken, and then we act. It’s very important always to draw on the Hermetic axiom “as above so below.” In order to understand the greater picture, just look at your own life when you wake up in the morning. Darkness, awakening, activity. And then when you create anything in the Kabbalah, there are the archetypal worlds, the Atziluth, but you can’t have an archetype without a plan. The template is Beria, but then you have to have a form, Yetzira, and then you have the physical material, Assiya. So, in order to create anything on Earth, we need a vision, we need a plan, we need tools to do the job and we need the material. So, the Supreme Consciousness does just that.
Rick: St. Teresa of Avila said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” What do you think about that?
Edi: Yes, he is.
Rick: Like, he or she or it is an evolving being of some sort.
Edi: God’s not a static thing out there. It is part of the journey that we call consciousness, and we are journeying the consciousness as well, yes. These are all words, and words are very imperfect. Therefore, we need words and expressions from different cultures and different religions and interlock them to get the fuller picture.
Rick: Yeah, I just recently learned in the past year or so that even within the field of Vedanta, which you would probably consider, which is sort of a small niche of the entire realm of religion and spirituality, there are at least half a dozen different schools that pretty much totally disagree with each other. [Laughter]
Edi: Well, yes, they’ve had some friendly disagreements. Samkhya is the other one, but it really is asking the question, the Advaita Vedanta, which is the non-dual, and the Samkhya, which is supposedly dual. There is no dichotomy if we see that we have two legs, but there is one body. So, if we are asking questions of the legs, we adopt a dual approach. If we’re looking to the body, we are asking questions of a non-dual type.
Rick: That’s good, yeah, and both are relevant to different levels of experience or different dimensions of reality.
Edi: Exactly! Yeah, levels and categories are vital questions to be aware of before one asks any question. Yeah.
Rick: Sri Ramakrishna did a nice job of harmonizing all these different fields by just using the blind man and the elephant analogy that, you know, blind men are all correct. There’s a bigger picture that is kind of more than the collection of their individual perspectives.
Edi: Most certainly. And David Bohm in the scientific realm said, “Science too long starts with the individual jigsaw pieces and tries to put them together, rather than starting with the whole elephant, he didn’t say elephant, with the whole picture, and then see how the various limbs and the trunk and the tusks come out of it.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, so at the beginning of this interview, I asked you for the elevator pitch of, you know…
Edi: [Laughter] You want the closing elevator pitch.
Rick: Yeah, let’s say now it’s the end of the workday and you’re running into the same guy on the elevator and you want a closing elevator pitch that subsumes and summarizes and, you know, perhaps gives food for thought as based upon what we’ve discussed.
Edi: Well, the wonderful saying in ‘Light on the Path’, that the soul of man is a thing whose splendor and beauty is without limits. I’m slightly paraphrasing it. Each man is his own lawgiver, the giver of glory or doom to himself. Now, I fully agree with all those poor civilians being bombed. You can say, “Oh, what have they done?” Well, yes, but in terms of very, very high-level aphorisms, very high-level, each man meaning each person. And man means the thinking principle, by the way. It’s nothing to do with gender. Each man is his own lawgiver, ultimately the giver of gloom or glory to himself. But the soul of man, as Florence Nightingale pointed out, is a thing whose splendor and growth has absolutely no limits.
Rick: Nice, thank you. So you have a website, and the website has links to your books, so I’ll be linking to that and to those. And is there anything else that people can do to stay in touch with you? Do you have a mailing list? Do you ever do Zoom calls or anything like that?
Edi: My contact details are on the website, Rick, and it’s a very easy get-in-touch form.
Rick: Okay, good.
Edi: I’d be very happy to hear from anyone.
Rick: Okay, well, everyone-
Edi: And can I say, Rick, how wonderful it is to meet you, and I really mean that. And what you are doing is you are spreading light. I don’t mean this other than very sincerely. You are spreading knowledge and wisdom and trying to undertake a healing of what’s going on around us, and my goodness, do we need it.
Rick: We certainly do. Yeah, that’s my motivation, has been since I became a meditation teacher at the age of 21.
Edi: Wonderful.
Rick: And you know, as the Beatles sang, we’re all doing what we can.
Edi: And a little more.
Rick: Yeah. All right, so thanks so much, Edi.
Edi: Thank you very much, Rick.
Rick: Yeah, thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And my next interview will be with the woman named Georgette Starr, and I think she’s going to talk about the wisdom of aging and you know, elders and what they have to contribute to.
Edi: Oh, a lot, yes.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Wonderful.
Rick: Good.
Edi: So, all of these are interlocking and creating a wonderful body of wisdom.
Rick: Yeah.
Edi: Thank you, Rick.
Rick: Sure, thank you, Edi, and I hope to meet you in person someday, as I always say. I meet so many wonderful people that I’ve never met in person.
Edi: Definitely.
Rick: Yeah. Okay. Thank you everybody.
Edi: Bye.