Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves The stages of human development are to strive for Possession (Artha), Knowledge (Dharma), Ability (Kama), Being (Moksha) Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge. It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further – when man dies his karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.
I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.
The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy. . . has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.
If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian| warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.
Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason - you and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole. Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.
What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.
If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be sorry, I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.
The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
Entanglement is not one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details.
The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday.
Why are atoms so small?. . . Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.
In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.
Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question. Science has no answer to it.
It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, "Who are we?