A Field Theory of Consciousness

How can a relative handful of peace-creating experts sit, eyes closed, and radiate an easily measurable influence of harmony and peace into the collective consciousness around them? The main idea can be stated simply:

Consciousness, like every other aspect of nature—like gravity, like electromagnetism, like the nuclear forces and the subatomic “particles”—is at basis an unbounded, nonmaterial field.

Radio provides an analogy
When the radio was first invented, very few people believed the claim that communication could now take place without wires. Even at demonstrations of radio transmission, audiences often thought that the wires must be hidden somehow.

A century later, however, we are much more familiar with radio waves and other invisible field effects. The electromagnetic field, for example, exists everywhere in the universe—nonmaterial and omnipresent. Radio, TV, radar, global positioning systems, and the Sun (as well as all other sources of light) produce their effects by stimulating waves in this underlying electromagnetic field.

The gravitational field works the same way, as do the two other force fields of nature. Even the basic building blocks of the apparently physical world—the subatomic “particles”—are in fact propagating waves in quantum fields.

At fundamental levels of nature, in other words, accounting for every aspect of the apparently physical universe, invisible, nonmaterial waves traverse invisible, nonmaterial fields. These descriptions emerge from richly detailed and highly rigorous quantum field theories, theories supported experimentally to greater levels of precision than any theories in the history of science.

A field theory of consciousness
To understand peace-creating groups, therefore, it is only necessary to assume that consciousness operates like every other aspect of nature. In this view consciousness, too, is an infinite, invisible field—an “ocean” of awareness or intelligence everywhere available—with waves that radiate throughout society.

This is not the normal understanding of consciousness, of course. We know we are conscious, we know we are awake. But what is wakefulness, what is consciousness? We vaguely picture our mind inside our head, closed up in our skull, as though the brain and the mind were one and the same.

But the Vedic understanding, examined in detail on this site, indicates that consciousness, like every other aspect of nature, is an unbounded, all-pervasive field everywhere available—that it is, in fact, the most fundamental of all the fields in nature, the source of both forces and matter—a concept corroborated by the latest unified quantum field theories. From one standpoint, therefore, the human brain can be seen as an intricate broadcasting and receiving station for waves traversing this field of consciousness.