I have been reading Reflections by Swami Vivekananda. It's particularly puzzling to me because I have been a non-believer my whole life, but the story that unfolded and led me to this moment is profound. I came to the non-dualist realization through science, and there is this coherence between ancient philosophy and modern physics that I cannot properly explain, but I need to try anyway.
Physics is very simple when you can visualize better. For thousands of years, since Democritus and the ancient Greeks, there has been a thought pattern: if you keep cutting an object into its smallest parts, you will eventually get to an atom. This thought process is paramount for understanding physics. First principles thinking means the same thing, you regress until you get to a point where you can properly explain where phenomena originated from. It's a very simple idea, yet it's the only way we understand anything. We do it all day, every day; regression is inbuilt in our thinking.
Atoms together make all the objects we see around us. But what are atoms made of? This is where everything gets interesting. Protons, neutrons, and electrons together make an atom. Protons and neutrons are further divided into quarks, but electrons cannot be broken down further, much like the quarks themselves. When you reach this stage, they are called fundamental particles. We recently discovered the Higgs boson, which gives mass to all these other particles. The Higgs boson is also a fundamental particle. Fundamental means they cannot be divided anymore, that they are not made up of anything else.
But as I said earlier, regression is inbuilt in our thinking. We cannot help but keep thinking: what are they made of? Is there one fundamental particle or Something that so miraculously orchestrated this reality? This is exactly where everything has a dark cloud over them, a dark cloud of doubt. String theory and all the other theories that have been put before us are shrouded with this dark cloud. And understandably so.
We perceive things with our eyes, and this is vital to our understanding of the world. But the minute scale at which particles and their counterparts operate has always been outside of our visual grasp. We can photograph atoms now, but I don't think it is physically possible to get any smaller of an aperture to take a picture. The good news is that they all exude various fields that we can detect. It's important to understand this visual impairment we face when dealing at this scale. There is always a disconnect, what we think, our eyes might never be able to verify.
There is also a silver lining to all this: as everything gets very vague, everyone can speculate. Let's speculate about an idea ourselves.
Let's start with electrons, as they are most evident to us in our everyday lives. We cannot live without electricity, and the only way we get electricity is by making electrons travel from negative to positive terminals. In the process, they generate a field which we call electricity. Here's the catch: we know that when the universe was created, we were given a fixed amount of energy that we have to keep using until it dies out, the law of conservation of energy. In simple terms, we cannot do anything else other than making electrons flow from negative to positive. We cannot create electrons; we cannot simulate the field they generate. All we can do is convert other forces to a point where we can make electrons flow in that direction.
We burn fossil fuels, we have nuclear energy, which essentially is just a big bowl of boiling water that generates steam so fast that it moves a turbine at thousands of RPM, all this to get to the same point of making electrons flow from negative to positive terminals. We can only convert, and in the process get some electricity. The big bottleneck in all this is heat, we lose far more than we generate, but that's a topic for another day.
We know electrons are fundamental and cannot be divided anymore. But we are speculating, let's speculate that we can divide the electrons, and for the sake of it, let's say that it is a field. A field from where all particles emerge.
Think of an enormous sponge, so big that it is the entire universe, and you're in the center of it. All you see around you is sponge. You obviously cannot move inside a solid sponge, so let's make it invisible so that we can move through it without ever noticing it exists. Now, this sponge had to have existed before the Big Bang, and it was a playground for all kinds of miraculous behaviors. We know that the sponge is always connected, and everything emerges from it through fields. The point at which something intersects, we get a field. Let's just say that "something" is just the sponge being a sponge. When it moves, it creates interaction points, and a field emerges.
Now these fields will obviously interact and create intersections of their own, just like water ripples do when you throw a stone in a pond. And the cycle keeps going until we get to the particles we know of. We have just made a huge jump, we have connected the known particles with the most fundamental, ever-present reality that is our sponge. Now we can call this sponge all kinds of things: God, consciousness, and all the things we can think of. Everything is emerging from this sponge. It absorbs and holds everything. When something moves inside it, it creates ripples that affect everything in its vicinity.
This speculation obviously has holes in it, mainly concerning time. The reason behind the title "Entropy is Time" is very simple. We supposed that in the process of the sponge being a sponge, it creates intersections. It is moving. That movement is entropy. No matter how still an object is, something inside at its core is always moving.
Now, this entropy is also moving in one direction, right? It is creating fields and not the other way around. Time awfully sounds similar, doesn't it? We often forget that time is a term we humans came up with. Entropy is fundamental. The sponge has to keep settling as interactions inside keep growing. Hence all we get is entropy. In the process of entropy, we get this world that we experience every day. Even our minds are going through the same process, our thoughts keep fading away, and new ones come in and make new ripples.
Now the big hole: we can see from throwing a stone in a pond that when the ripples hit the edge walls, they revert back. Does it mean entropy or time also gets reversed at some point? One way to counter this is by making the sponge infinite, which is very plausible. The ripples never revert back to each other as there are no edge walls in the sponge. We can keep coming up with holes, but none can be bigger than this time one. Entropy is time.
Now, I am a very curious person, and I like to learn about anything I get my hands on. I knew I was a non-dualist because it's been a long time since I came up with the sponge speculation. But it has always been a field in my mind, and the sponge analogy is just for the sake of simplicity. The field that is ever-present. Just one field. There is no other thing except this. Hence it is non-dual.
Thousands of years ago, the Indians came up with the term Brahman, which essentially means the same thing we are talking about. The only difference is they came to this conclusion purely through philosophy. It's only since the past century that we have all this specific knowledge about particles and reality. I have always been a non-believer and a skeptic my whole life, but this non-dual philosophy of the Upanishads is pretty much the same thing we are all trying to explore. Every question leads to this point: What are we? Why are we here? Making the sponge ever-present gets rid of these questions as it invalidates our momentary existence.
We are all slaves to our minds, and the only way you realize this is by asking the hard questions over and over until you get to this point. The coherence I talked about at the beginning is very much this point between the science and the spiritual at which they are essentially talking about the same thing. Obviously, in the spiritual realm, the conclusion has already been made: Brahman. But the sponge is still new, and science is not at the point where it can detect the sponge.
The profound realization is not that ancient philosophy was right all along, but that two completely different paths, empirical investigation and contemplative inquiry, keep arriving at the same destination.