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Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything
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Average Rating:  out of 32 Reviews
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $8.92
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Manufacturer: Inner Traditions
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EAN (European Article Number): 9781594771811
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Ervin Laszlo
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Publisher: Inner Traditions
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Edition: 2nd
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Dewey Decimal Number: 501
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Publication Date: 2007-05-03
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Reading Level: 208
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Description: Presents the unifying world-concept long sought by scientists, mystics, and sages: an Integral Theory of Everything
• Explains how modern science has rediscovered the Akashic Field of perennial philosophy
• New edition updates ongoing scientific studies, presents new research inspired by the first edition, and includes new case studies and a section on animal telepathy
Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic Field is real and has its equivalent in science’s zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness. This zero-point Akashic Field is the constant and enduring memory of the universe. It holds the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos and relates it to all that is yet to happen.
In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything. We discover that, as philosopher William James stated, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Pseudo-Science Wrapped in Science |
Date: 2008-10-21 |
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Details: This book had so many terrific reviews, albeit from questionable sources, that I thought I should read it to find out whether or not there was some recent development I was unaware of in physics. What a huge disappointment!
This book is a work of pseudoscience. The presentation is to first review advances in physics, then to present pseudoscience such as dowsing, remote viewing, psychic healing --- you name it. The author then returns to more reviews of advances in physics, then back to pseudoscience. The main thesis is that there is some field (the "Akashic" field) that permeates the universe or the Metaverse (the *real* universe!) and informs (actually "in-forms" as "in the process of formation" --- cute, eh?) all parts of the universe of everything that happens everywhere else at all times.
Although the author claims that his thesis is "not unscientific," his presentation of the theory, presentation of evidence, etc. is definitely unscientific. This author presents a well-known logical fallacy: Scientific language does not make science. That is, merely using the terminology of, and citing results from a discipline does not make the discussion valid in that discipline. This author is obviously attempting to put his ideas in good standing by name-dropping, aligning his thesis with selected portions of modern science, and so on.
You can easily achieve the same good results by reading articles in Scientific American. You can avoid the ill effects of this book by reading Skeptical Inquirer.
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Review Summary: A very insightful and satisfying read |
Date: 2008-09-17 |
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Details: What Did I Get Out of the Read?
-------------------------------
This is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read for a long time. It brought together, in one theory a lot of the loose ends of "weird" science and paranormal experience and tied them with a normal science-based knot.
What Did I Think of the Book?
-----------------------------
This guy has so many academic degrees and awards I am barely worthy of reading his book, never mind reviewing it! False humility aside, although this book takes a scientific approach to the subject matter, is targeted to the layman.
It is remarkable as a serious, educated attempt at a scientific framework for explanation of much of the paranormal. Laszlo is neither a scientist, nor a paranormal investigator. He has an eclectic academic career - in this book he plays the philosopher of science. He explains his theory of the Akashic field (A-Field) that causes the coherence we see at all levels of nature - from the strange non-local effects of quantum physics, up through Bose Einstein condensates, molecules and consciousness to the problem of the uniformity of the cosmos. The heavy duty maths and conceptual detail are missing. It is left to an exercise to the readers to discover the rigorous physics that underpins the speculative theory ;-). It is intellectually a very satisfying book to read because it so effectively applies Ockham's razor - so much is explained by a theory that "introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities."
This and Dean Radin's book "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality" seem to be at the forefront of laying down a scientific foundation for the explanation of the workings of hitherto paranormal events. |
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Review Summary: Excellent, straightforward discussion of complex subjects. |
Date: 2008-07-21 |
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Details: Reading this book was a joyful experience. Of course, if you want a more profound, detailed, technical if you will, discussion you can read one of the several books by the same author on this or related subject.Or, other authors on this same matter. I enjoyed very much the previous to the last part: The Phenomenon of Coherence where Dr. Laszlo discusses the Coherence in Consciousness with such a simple approach that it made the complex subject a very understandable one. He also refers his discussion to several well known resources on the subject. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to introduce him/herself into the realm of universal consciousness phenomenon. |
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Review Summary: Hope may exist. |
Date: 2008-07-21 |
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Details: In this book, Ervin Laszlo is taking us on a journey, previously attempted by many authors/thinkers, from the antiquity to the current era. Laszlo's trek is different, however, because it not only incorporates, in quite a readable format, some of the discoveries in frontier sciences such as cosmology but also uses concepts of Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory. Such an approach allows the author a high degree of conceptual integration which he aptly labels coherence. For those whose thoughts are not quite as ethereal but are still primarily matter-bound, the venture into transpersonal psychology, the mind, etc. may still feel too many conceptual light-years away. Sporadic studies of analogies in morphology, physiology, and behavior among separated but at birth identical twins, have been just as mysterious and intriguing as is the concept of nonlocal coherence and teleportation, so far proven to exist only in the quantum world. What unifies the quantum observations with those of the studied twins is that in both instances, there is an initial entanglement, a form of a special and close relationship in physical and biologic realms respectively.
The capability of biologic entities to generate magnetic waves is also touched upon by the authors as a possible medium of near instantaneous communication within the human body. The release of magnetic waves, albeit following an external magnetic jolt, is already explored in the current usage of magnetic resonance imaging, the MRI, in medicine. It is a technology which allows for unprecedented and near-real time images of the human body in health and disease.
This book literarily teleports us to another paradigm. At a time of human and climate instability, this book goes a long way toward making the existence of Universe-wide and all-encompassing connections worth deep exploration. The author utilized science-based observations, with a special focus on the paradigm of integration/coherence, to raise the plausibility of bi-directional relationships not just within esoteric quantum physics but among all of us and all that surrounds us on any scale. This book is very timely and highly recommended.
Ivo P. Janecka, MD, MBA, PhD
Janecka@post.harvard.edu
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Review Summary: An old theory in a new package |
Date: 2007-12-28 |
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Details: This book is another illustrative example of how complex, philosophic and unrealizable to direct experience a theory-of-everything (TOE) can become once you wander too far down the wrong rabbit hole. A real theory-of-everything should be so simple and run so close to your being and everyday experience that a three year child could easily understand and relate to it, it should not be something requiring multiple Phds' to decode and still find yourself having many difficulties visualizing and connecting the dots to. There are much simpler TOEs around. One simply states - "God-IS" while another says "I Am That" and you can even join these together, if you want. But the ego needs its fix of complexity, inventiveness, and ingenuity and avoids naked simplicity, which does not meets its needs for specialness.
Ervin's TOE links the Vedic notion of the Akashic Field to physical space through the notion of the quantum vacuum. He sees this vacuum, as a subtle energy sea and as a very active plenum rather than an inert space and background to the world of matter. And he uses his linkage in his attempt to marry science with mystical insights and religion, mind with matter, consciousness with perception.
He indicates that information is encoded through the modulation of quantum state fluctuations in the energy sea of the quantum vacuum. The encoding mechanism itself, he sees as holographic in nature and arise out of the coherent interference patterns setup and created by the interpenetration (entanglement) of the waves represented by the wave functions of individual quanta. While, the reading mechanism of the stored information back into consciousness, he sees as relying on resonance and phase conjugation which can occur between the quantum-ly superimposed wavefunctions (quantum entanglement) setup by the chemicals in our brain and that of the quantum vacuum of the world around us.
His theory therefore borrows heavily on Bohm's idea of an implicate order and on the notion of a higher dimensional existence, in which the holographic fields representing all possible quantum states and therefore encodings can be stored. Bohm relied on the concept of "hidden variables" to connect this higher dimensional theoretical existence to the manifest existence that we experience. The big difference of course, is that Bohm's higher dimensional existence was not a higher order physical dimensional existence but only higher order dimensionally in terms of our understanding. It suggests a higher order evolution in our mental and psychic development than a higher order objective dimensional existence and is closer therefore to the understandings of Ouspensky and Kant. He saw the limited context imposed by the belief in 3-D space and time and the apparent separation between things as insufficient in itself to adequately explain many phenomena in the world appearing around us and saw that our real hope was only in transcending this limited context.
This newer context, which he called the implicate order he felt would help connect and explain all known/unknown phenomena in a higher and `truer' modality. He realized that most of the phenomena are not real in themselves but are artifacts imposed by our mind's limited context. Just as a sphere cutting two dimensional space would be experienced as growing circles and therefore "alive" when viewed in 2-D space would appear as being fundamentally static in a 3-D one. Bohm elucidated this idea in his example of the simultaneous video recordings of two views of a fish piped to two different TV screens. And he used this as an alternative explanation of Alain Aspect's findings on the non-local connection and 'faster-than-light' signaling between quantumly entangled particles.
In Bohm's view this apparent instantaneous communication between the two fish on two screens can be entirely understood if we drop the notions of two fish, the `faster than light' signaling as well as the belief in the space appearing to separate them as real. He indicated that all of this is also easily explainable, in an alternative explanation once we are prepared to transcend the many contextual limitations imposed by our current belief system. His explanation of these non-local phenomena is that all we are seeing is just two views of the same fish and we use our minds to project these different views through space, which has no true existence in itself. This then makes the fish appear to be separate as two different entities, yet somehow synchronised and communicating non-locally.
And so, the two fish are not instantaneously communicating with each other through space, because there is only one fish and no space. Therefore Bohm's theory is that we are only ever seeing (with quantum entanglement and non-local connections) different views of same undifferentiated oneness of ultimate reality that we then projected to different locations in space and time and then take to be separate entities in themselves. So we are really projecting our biased beliefs in time, space and the separation as a fundamental mold which behaves as false context that then embeds and limits our experiencing of phenomena. Within this limiting context, there can be no direct experience of reality as it is and therefore of the noumenal existence. And so like the teachings of "A Course in Miracles", only Oneness IS, the belief in separation is a faulty construct developed through limitations in our mental evolution and our many attempts to partition reality on our own terms.
And so Bohm's understandings correlate closely to Plato's analogy in "the cave". In this analogy the prisoners, tied together in the confines of the cave since birth see the meaningless shadows arising on the cave wall as representing all that there is to experience and fail to recognize, that these shadows but represent weak reflections of the real world as experienced through the distorted lens imposed by the limited scope and context through which they are experienced. In the same way Ervin hints that what we experience into our manifest world of experience instant-by-instant but one holographic encoding of all possible holographic encodings and it is this encoding that gets stored to the eternal record of the Akashic Field. He briefly describes some of the common elements to the various string theories that also support this belief and to explain that the quantum-ly collapsed state of our individual experience operating within a fundamental multi-dimensional existence beyond our own scope and experience.
The key mistakes, that I feel Ervin makes are that he takes the world of matter and space, to be real in-and-of itself. In fact, he sees matter as arising out of and to be interchangeable with space. He therefore believes in an external world and espouses the belief in Evolutionary Panpsychism that "there is no categorical divide between mind and matter... conscious matter at a lower level of organisation (the neurons in the brain) generates conscious matter at a higher level of organisation (the brain as a whole). He therefore ties the Akashic field (A-Field) to physical existence and the existing notions of the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field and the Higgs field.
But, I am confident that his belief that there is not categorical divide beween mind and matter is where he makes the compromise that will never work. They arise out of his attempt to reconcile his direct experience of his own consciousness with his concurrent belief in an external world of matter. And so if I hold a cup of tea in my hand. The epiphenomenalists will attempt to convince me that this cup can create me along with all the refinements in my consciousness, while the mystics and enlightened, say otherwise that we create the cup out of our consciousness. Ervin adds to this the third view that my consciousness and the cup co-create each other. But reason would say that one must be cause and the other the effect, and this effect is entirely dependant on its cause. The epiphenomenalists belief that our consciousness is tied to matter and cannot exist apart from it contradicts however the findings of transpersonal psychology, OBEs, NDEs, ADCs etc. The panpsychism view it ultimately the view that both consciousness and matter can exist without a real cause since each is a cause and effect of each other. The mystical and religious view is that all is consciousness, it does not deny matter as part of the experience of our consciousness but insists that it has no existence in-and-of itself, independent of this consciousness.
This is the understanding that there is no world (excepting the Absolute) apart from our conscious experience of it. Our consciousness and its subtle involutions creates the world of our experience and all its apparent evolutions. This understanding takes the world appearing outside back inside us. And so isthe understanding also matter is not and cannot ever become conscious, rather that consciousness appears in the form of matter if we limit the context enough through our conscious ideas. And so consciousness like any good river flows downstream to lower and lower levels based on more and more restrictive and limiting contexts into which we put it. In one limiting context, it may appear as a dog, in a lower one as a cell and in a lower one still as a rock. It is the same one-consciousness seen in the mind's eye through the different transparencies established by each context. Remove our belief in any particular context and consciousness will no longer appear in that form.
This was the teaching of the original and real Akashic field as espoused by Vedic thought. That it is all recorded and available because it is recorded not only at the level of our conscious development, but at the cellular level, at the organic levels and at higher levels of consciousness more subtle than our own. One last point on this, just because we experience something, does not mean that it is true. We have truer and falser experiences all the time but all perceptions have some error in it, being born out of error and the fall from the undifferentiated reality. And so people experiences their dreams as real but find them to be false and lacking substance on awaking, those with schizophrenia and on drugs experience worlds that do not exist apart from their own mind and their own belief in them and we all share in some individual and collective hallucinations that we then take to be true amd self-evident because we experience them and they are validated by others from the apparent outside.
And so, just because one experiences the world of space, matter and an external world does not mean that it is true, just part of your experience. In time, this experience will be seen to be an unreal or a very limiting modality of living as we undergo even more refined quantum evolutions in our consciousness. After all, consciousness at the organism or cellular level have no conscious experience of us because it downstream from us on the consciousness level. It can only deem, its own limited experience as valid to itself. This is not surprising, because we do the exact same thing, believing in the reality of matter and in an external world when in reality all these are just part of our own experiential level, given our level of conscious evolution. Consciousness itself will eventually disappear, because it can only exist in duality. Once restored to awareness of Oneness, duality is seen to be a faulty construct and so without purpose simply disappears.
Some of the other sections of this book attempt to join the findings of cosmology, quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, remote viewing, many lives, as well as some of the findings in modern biology such as morphogenetic fields within the context of the non-local intelligence of the A-Field. I have no problem with this just with his placement of the A-field itself and his attempts to mix-up true cause-and-effect relationships. If he had placed the Akashic field and record within the universal consciousness, and this existing as an imperfect formulation of fundamental spaceless essence of the One-mind, all would be fine.
In the book, he talks of Pierre S. Laplace's comments to emperor Napolean, namely that God was a hypothesis for which there is no longer any need. Do not mistake this for a random innocuous quote from an otherwise unbiased and impartial observer, for we all scavenge the world of our perception, in search for all that is like us and which appears to strengthen out thought system and to consolidate our own beliefs about ourselves. And this particular TOE is Ervin's own belief about himself and his attempts to offer it to you for your belief.
A Course in Miracles discusses our attempts to dismiss God in this way and have creation under our own terms and beliefs, in its section called "The Authority Problem".In indicates that this world of duality, of many apparent separate things represent nothing more than our attempts to usurp the power of God and have reality on our own terms rather than how it is. We create this artifice of our experience as a cover to hide ourselves from God. But it is all mindless and without meaning and represents only our attempts to add meaning to the meaningless. They are just attempts of escapism and the fundamental Truth that we cannot and did not create ourselves, for our creation is beyond our own error. And so God remains present but yet out of our awareness because of the many mindless and meaningless artifices we have attempted to interpose between Truth and our experience of Truth.
Ervin's background is as a system's theorist. These are the folk that go madly hopping about like magpies looking for the shiney trinkets of apparent value from many diverse fields and then attempting to join them into a convergent thought system and systems theory that meets with the umbrella of their own beliefs and biases. Sometimes, they make useful connections but most often they attempt to make a Cleopatra from many different body parts that they have collected over the years.
These are not the inner explorers or those real thinkers that build from below ground level often from first principles that need to be invented and to establish a new framework or context that does not yet exist. Einstein and Bohm fall into this latter category. If phenomena cannot be explained by the existing theory, then maybe an entire new theory and context is needed instead. They do not try to have the theory meet with the biases of common sense and personal experience knowing both can be invalid.
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