First the Story of Indra.

Indra was strolling around with the Devatas in the heaven when he saw pigs rolling in muck and eating the shit of men on earth. “Life is so beautiful but what a life they have?” he thought “I must teach them to come out of their wallowing existence”.

He entered the body of a pig in the sty. Soon he got attracted towards a female pig and mated with her. She gave birth to piglets. He lazed around in the mire, his body smeared with faeces and felt happy with the female pig and their beautiful piglets.

The Devatas of heaven saw the plight of Indra and asked him to come out. But, Indra the pig, would not listen, instead he told the gods that it was pleasurable and perfectly fine to be in this pig sty. He loved the piglets and the female pig and found nothing wrong with his existence.

Devatas could not take it any longer. They had to rescue the king. Indra’s attachment to the female pig and the piglets was evident. They killed the piglets first. Indra, the pig, wailed and wept and went to the female pig “I want more piglets” he said. The gods knew that he was deluded by the attachment, not only to the piglets but to the female pig. So they killed the female pig, too. Indra wept, raved and ranted and so Devatas pierced the pig and the soul of Indra was released from the dead body.

Suddenly, Indra, became himself, the god of heaven. He looked at the pig sty, the dead bodies of the piglets and the female pig and said “What a bad dream it was”

This is what happens to everyone’s consciousness. It is encapsulated in a physical body. It is in bondage and does not see the chains and bars that hold it together in an unreal world. Indra is the god of all gods, king of heaven living eternally in perfection and enjoys unmitigated state of ecstasy but when he takes on the body of a pig, he too, becomes a slave of his consciousness.

When you have consciousness of a pig then you behave like one and when you have consciousness of Indra then consciousness has no boundaries.

The arguments of Arjun not to fight in this battle of “The Principle” were based on his deluded state of pig consciousness. His vision was limited and was not able to see the larger picture. He argued how principles of life would be destroyed, how the caste system and character of women and mankind would change. He looked at reality presented to him through his senses of perception. He put forth all arguments for not fighting the battle from his limited “Waking state of Consciousness”. He procrastinated, used reasoning and logic, expressed his fears and phobias by telling Krishna that why he would not fight.

What is consciousness?

Consciousness is not a thing and does not have parameters. The very question “what is consciousness” is wrong because it is not a noun. Consciousness is a subjective experience and trying to search for objectivity is a wrong place to start with. Light or dark or cold or hot or of anger and hate or love and compassion are all subjective experiences. Each of us will react to an event/situation in our own personal way. The experiences cannot be digital but variable like analogue numbers for every other person.

We are conscious is a fact based on our experience of every passing moment but “Consciousness” is an abstraction. It is the state of “Being”. Consciousness “IS”. Everything has sprung up from this Consciousness, the far flung galaxies in the dark space, milky way with billions of stars, the solar system, the earth, the seas and mountains, flora and fauna and the homo-sapiens. Consciousness is cause and content of the creation.

The reality of this transcendental field is mystical in nature for the scientists who are working on the microscopic levels trillions and trillions times smaller than an atom. The laws of classical physics do not apply to this microscopic level of subatomic particles like photons, electrons, quarks or gravitons.

What does it mean that laws of classical physics are not obeyed?

There are two parts to existence, the manifest field of energy particles called matter and the un manifest part, the vacuum or the quantum field. The laws of thermodynamics belong to the classical physics dealing with matter.

If a glass of water is lying on the table then it would keep lying there until a force is exerted on it. But in the Quantum domain a particle could be at several places at the same time. It could be here, there or everywhere without exertion of an external force.

Scientists like Einstein believed that an electron was a particle but he was proved wrong by other scientific experiments that an electron was a wave. What does it mean in simple language?

If we look at the surface of water and drop a pebble, the water will spread out in concentric waves. Where is the wave? It is everywhere in that concentric circle. Please see the diagram below.

An electron revolving around a nucleus is also like this wave but in three dimensions. It displays characteristic of a wave. The electron could be anywhere in this sphere and everywhere, like a wave.

“Where are you Mr. Electron?”

“I am everywhere in this orbit and not confined to a single position.”

But the act of observation collapses this wave function to a point particle. Electron that was everywhere at the same time now takes a position.

That’s the paradox. That’s the illusion.