Reproduced from: https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/article/4078
Fundamental shifts are on the horizon. Before this watershed year 2012 is over, a thorough transformation will get off the ground in economics and in business, as well as in politics and in civil society. These “worldshifts” include a major development in science: a paradigm-shift.
Science is not the immutable enterprise of observing the world around us and describing our observations; it’s subject to change. Change in science is triggered by new and unexpected, and initially unexplained observations. These produce the radical changes scientists call scientific revolutions. They impact on far more than science: they open fresh vistas for all of us. It is important to get to know the nature of science’s next revolution—what triggers it, what view it gives us of the world, and what it means for our own life and for our shared future on the planet.
Revolution!
Theories in science are not indefinitely tenable. For a while they explain the facts that come to light in the relevant fields, but when key observations fail to mesh with the dominant conception, the theories are either revised, or they break down. If the mismatch is persistent, piecemeal adjustments will not work. The theory needs to be replaced; a fundamentally new conception must take its place. The enterprise of science advances through such “paradigm-shifts”—the periodic renewal of its fundamental conceptions. There was a paradigm-shift at the turn of the 20th century when key observations failed to mesh with the basic assumptions of Newtonian physics: scientists soon abandoned those assumptions and adopted Einstein’s revolutionary theories in their place. Today relativity theory itself fails to mesh with new observations, and the challenger, quantum theory, is not free of problems either.
The astounding—and for the established theories entirely mysterious—observation is instant, space- and time-transcending interconnection among nearly all the things scientists observe in the principal fields of investigation. It appears that we live is an integral universe where all things affect all other things. In this universe all things are connected, but they are not just locally connected, at a given point in space and time. They are nonlocally connected over all points. As a result the natural sciences find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Maintain the dominant conception and hope to adapt it to the new findings—or create a new and different conception? The latter is a revolution: a paradigm-shift. When it comes—and now it is coming—it heralds the shift from a fragmented “local-state” paradigm inherited from Newton, to the new nonlocal-state paradigm based on the latest advances in quantum and bio-physics and cosmology.
Enter the Akasha
Why is the new nonlocal-state paradigm an Akashia paradigm? The reason for this is clear and can be spelled out.
Go back to the second half of the 20th century. Physicists had begun to trace the fields and forces of nature to common origins in a unified, and then in a grand-unified and then super-grand-unified field. An in-itself unobservable cosmic matrix entered the world-picture of science. David Bohm’s theory of the “implicate order” is a shining example of this development. The implicate order is the hidden holofield that produces the things that meet our eye: the spectacle of the “explicate order.”
A concept advanced by the Hindu seers thousands of years ago is an amazingly accurate anticipation of this development. The cosmos has a hidden dimension: the rishis called it the Akasha. They said that the Akasha encompasses all the other elements: vata (air), agni (fire), ap (water), and prithivi (earth). It holds all the elements within itself, but it is also outside of them, because it is beyond space and time.
In his famous treatise Raja Yoga, Swami Vivekananda wrote that the Akasha “is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha … it is the Akasha that becomes the human body, the animal body, the plants, every form that we see, everything that can be sensed, everything that exists.”
The modern yogi Paramahansa Yogananda agreed: the Akasha is the subtle background against which everything in the world becomes perceptible. The Akasha cannot be seen; it can only be observed when it becomes the things that we do see. The Akasha is hidden but fundamental reality of the world.
Bowing to the insight of the ancient Hindu seers, we call the world’s fundamental dimension the Akasha. And we call the basic conception that grounds science’s revolutionary new theories the Akasha Paradigm.
Tapping Into the Akasha
In her autobiography I’m Over All That, Shirley MacLaine writes that she is often reading “the Akashic Records.” She is not alone. Today and all through history many people have made this claim, everyday women and men and not just actresses and shamans, artists and spiritual leaders. They were not mistaken: they were reading information sourced in the Akasha, the hidden deep dimension of the cosmos.
Why is knowing about the Akasha so important? First, because it gives us the best understanding ever of the fundamental nature of the world. This is not just a world of things moving about in space and time; that is only the surface. Below it there is an interconnected, holographically “in-formed” and fundamentally whole world where all things interpenetrate with all other things. A world where all things create themselves through these “cosmic connections. ” Second, because the realization that we live in a fundamentally whole world prompts us to think and to act differently. After all, we are not outside or above the world; the world is in us, just as we are in the world. What we do affects the world, and through the world affects us. It either makes us and our world more coherent and whole, or makes us and our world incoherent and unsustainable—prone to catastrophic breakdown.
Seeking wholeness and sustainability in the world are not fighting windmills and chasing mirages; they are the basic precondition of living and thriving in a nonlocally interconnected universe. Knowing that the world is intrinsically whole and locally as well as nonlocally interconnected changes the way we relate to each other and to the world. It gives us an aspiration toward wholeness and coherence; it takes us to a more evolved consciousness. In the final count this is what will spell the difference between heading toward a world that collapses into violence and chaos, and setting out on a path that is peaceful and sustainable, leading us to a world that is home to seven billion humans, thriving in a dependably life-supporting environment.
For more on the Akasha paradigm and what it means for us and our future, read Ervin Laszlo’s new books: The Akasha Paradigm: Revolution in Science, Evolution in Consciousness, and his enhanced multi-media e-book with video clips by Deepak Chopra, Edgar Mitchell, Marilyn Williamson and others: The Birth of the Akasha Paradigm: New Thinking for a New World. Both can be accessed at www.akashaparadigm.com
Published on Nov 5, 2014
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The Future of God (A Conversation between Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Kyra Phillips, CNN)
Deepak Chopra discusses the Akashic field as the field of all possibilities from which time and space emerge and in which information is stored and can be retrieved.
Kyra: This is the perfect segue to the akashic field. Explain what that is.
Deepak: Okay. Ancient wisdom traditions have said that there is a field beyond space and time from which everything emerges. It’s the pre-created field from where the universe from. The pre-created, which means before creation happens, but it’s always there, it’s eternal. I’ve asked cosmologists what the latest theory of creation is and they say something called eternal inflation which means there are quantum fluctuations which will on eternally so the universes will keep spinning out of this invisible domain forever into the future. But if you ask them, “Is eternal inflation possible backwards in time?”
They say probably. So you can’t say what is Genesis. Genesis you know says that there is a beginning. Well you know religious people say this has happened biblically or whatever.
Astrophysicists say 13.8 billion years ago and you say, oh because they are scientists they are probably right. How do you have a date when there was no time? How do you give a datable event to something that happened when there’s no time. So don’t get fooled by brilliant scientists like Stephen Hawking and other people that say there was a beginning. There was probably no beginning okay? It is eternal, beyond space-time, infinite giving rise to space and time. At least that’s the view that I am proposing. It’s not mine, it’s part of many wisdom traditions. The akashic field is the field of possibilities form where not only this universe emerged but also from which infinite universes emerged. They’re emerging, they’re arising, and they’re subsiding. This is a domain of potential energy information space-time in the world of material objects. We can access this through transcendence again we can abide in it, we can have a connection to it, and it is my feeling that people that intuition, insight, the so-called paranormal abilities (precognition, remembrance of other lifetimes, remote viewing, extra-sensory perception, remote healing). These people have dormant, non-local potentials that exist in every human being.
Published on Nov 6, 2014
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The Future of God (A Conversation between Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Kyra Phillips, CNN)
Deepak Chopra talks about the research Dr. Radin and others are conducting that can authenticate whether certain individuals can reliably access the Akashic field or not.
Kyra: So that’s real? These people that say they can tap in to the akashic, talk about the future, the past, that’s real?
Deepak: Some of that is real and as usual there are a lot of frauds everywhere who pretend that they can do it. But these days there are ways to tell. There are ways of testing it. So Dr. Dean Radin and many others have done experiments that they can validate that these potentials are real. Okay, that there are authentic psychics, authentic healers, authentic people with extra-sensory perception and the accuracy of this is beyond anything we could expect. You have to believe that it actually exists. You know in all fairness, I’ve accessed the field myself so I know it’s real.
You say, “What’s the scientific proof?”
The scientific proof is out there but what we are talking about is really a subjective experience. There are many studies going on, for example like at the Institute of Kuwait, the Institute of Noetic Sciences which was founded by Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut that went to the moon and he had a transcendent experience when he was coming back. He looked and he saw infinity in all directions and he was convinced there was a deeper intelligence at the heart of creation. He founded this institute to specifically study dharmic potentials. If you look at the yogic literature of India there are techniques to awaken the dharmic potentials. There’s actually a full chapter of these techniques. The yoga-sutra. We teach these techniques to our students here and many of them are able to awaken these dharmic potentials.
Published on Jul 21, 2012
The renowned philosopher of science speaks with us about the paradigm shift in the scientific community regarding what others have called the zero-point field or the quantum vacuum, and what he has called “the Akashic Field.” The recent announcement from CERN in Switzerland about the demonstration of the Higgs Boson, lends more support to the existence of a field that connects all consciousness and the entanglement that makes evolution possible. In this fascinating interview we discuss the Akasha Paradigm and its implications for humanity.
Published on Feb 14, 2014
