Is Consciousness the Unified Field? A Field Theorist's Perspective

Blurb

Progress in theoretical physics during the past decade has led to a progressively more unified understanding of the laws of nature, culminating in the recent discovery of completely unified field theories. The parallel discovery of a unified field of consciousness raises fundamental questions concerning the relationship between the two. Following a general introduction to unified quantum field theories, we consider the proposal due to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that the unified field of modern theoretical physics and the field of "pure consciousness" are identical. We show that the proposed identity between consciousness and the unified field is consistent with all known physical principles, but requires an expanded physical framework for the understanding of consciousness. Such a framework may indeed be required to account for experimentally observed field effects of consciousness and phenomenological aspects of higher states of consciousness.