Unity of consciousness

by Marinus Jan Marijs 

Theoretical physicist and Nobel-laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the greatest physicists of the 20^th century. In his books “What is life” (1944) and “My view of the world” (1964) he puts forward his thoughts about the nature of consciousness. According to Schrödinger “consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.” In his books he refers to the Upanishads insight: “Atman = Brahman means the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self”. To Schrödinger, consciousness is only One, singular and identifiable with its universal source: Brahman, the Absolute. The statement that “consciousness is One, singular” is similar to Plotinus’s famous statement that “the Absolute is one without a second”. The Absolute transcends space and time, being timeless, spaceless.The concept of union of consciousness is also to be found by Nick Herbert: in his explorations of the mystery of consciousness, also wants to know why there is a felt-sense of the “unity of conscious experience”: “Although we know the brain to be a massive parallel processor with many billions of operations going on at the same time, our inner experience seems to possess a single centre: whatever is going on seems to be happening to only one being.” Nick Herbert, Elemental Mind, op. cit., p. 46.