For well over a century, the Indian worldview and Vedic-inspired spirituality have captivated the West. The pioneers of quantum physics were fascinated by Indian cosmology and in recent decades millions of people embraced Indian spiritual practices like yoga and meditation. Indian spirituality played a key role in the development of New Age and the stage development theory of Ken Wilber, a synthesis of Indian thought and Western psychology. The higher mental stages in Wilber’s development model rely on Indian concepts and Sanskrit terminology. Curiously, much of the literature on the Indian role in the consciousness-raising practices developed in the West omit the Vedic concept of mind, Antahkarana (the four distinct parts of the mind), and Chidākāśa, translated as “conscious space” or “consciousness field.” Chidākāśa is a compound term that includes the notion of Akasha, the intangible and invisible substrate of the cosmos, comparable to the Western notion of the ether. The quantum physics community insists that Einstein’s Relativity Theory explained away the ether. The Indian sages would argue that Akasha is the medium that gives access to ultimate reality. Antahkarana can also shed light on the development of artificial intelligence. As we shall see, AI systems perform only two of the four parts of Antahkarana. It explains why AI can not be conscious and can only simulate consciousness. https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/connecting-indian-cosmology-western-psychology-and-ai/ Interesting example of philosophical speculation about consciousness. Like most philosophers of consciousness, he hypothesizes that consciousness cannot be explained by the mind as software running in the brain as hardware. Thus, AI cannot be truly conscious. In this case Hindu concepts of consciousness are used, but the argument is made by others using other religious or purely philosophical ideas. I think that advances in neurology, computer science, AI, and related fields will eventually prove the philosophers wrong, and that fully conscious AI systems will be developed.
Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet who was well known to diagnose and cure illnesses with information he received during trances he would enter, spoke often of the akashic records. He said it was where he got the information.
