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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m here again for part two with Dr. Ervin Laszlo. Today, we’ll focus on his new book recently released, The Immutable laws of the Akashic Field. Dr. Laszlo is an extraordinary individual in my view. Both a musician, a philosopher and scientist, and someone who has recently been named in 2019 one of the top 100 people in the realm of spirituality. I guess it was the 100 most spiritually influential living people in the world by Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine.
He was also cited among the top 100 world’s most inspiring people. If I had been a voter on either of those panels, I would’ve clearly nominated or voted yes. And after yesterday, I would emphasize that this is a gentleman who’s been prolific in the time since the pandemic has begun, and really, really setting a beautiful example for us, which you might call rising to the challenge that humankind faces.
Dr. Laszlo, thank you for joining me again. It’s really, really a powerful book, The Immutable Laws of Akashic Field. It is showing things. And you talk about at the early part of the book what I would say the three laws around which you see things.
But share with our listeners and viewers what inspired you to write this particular book, and what is the essence of Akashic Field history, and what you might call elements that you would like us to become aware of.
Ervin Laszlo:
Well, how I got to this idea of the Akashic Field is a story of actually of intellectual development. If you think in terms of the great choices, the great options, of embracing metaphysical or philosophical thinking about the world, you can think about Aristotelian and platonic race. And for most of my life, I was Aristotelian. I believed in empirical thinking, and just creates hypothesis on the basis of what you can observe. And then, verified by subjecting your predictions to empirical testing, and so on. This is a normal scientific method, which I recall in that sense Aristotelian.
Now, the platonic is a little different. The platonic doesn’t channel everything, doesn’t trace everything to the perceivable realm, to the empirical, to the experienceable. It talks about a deeper level, which Plato called the realm of the forms or ideas, where the soul is located. Something that transcends the perceivable, everyday world.
Now as I said, I started out being an Aristotelian, but then as time went on, I began to see more and more how the world that you perceive, the observable world, even though we perceive it now with more and more of a refined instrument, going deeper, further, and find enormous, fantastic things about the nature of the universes, still it all implies that there is something more than just what you can experience. I’m not saying what we experience, but what we can experience, and what is possible to experience.
So then, I begin, of course, of the Plato’s thinking of this deeper dimension. How everything that you perceive is really just a projection of the deeper dimension. And the famous allegory of the cave in Plato, right? He talks about a cave of prisoners are changed in such a way that they can’t turn around. There’s a big fire alive behind them, and there’s a wall in front of them. Now, they make shadows on the wall of the fire. They can’t turn around to see what this fire is, but this fire is behind them. And what you see on the wall are just the shadows, emanations in a way of that other dimension, which is behind us.
That’s an allegory. That is the real light of is behind us. Is in a way that we don’t perceive it, but we can infer it from what we do perceive. And if we really go deep down, I think then we’ll find is what you perceive doesn’t make sense in itself unless you assume that they are projections, emanations, or reflections of something deeper. Something which is more permanent deep down.
Now, it happens that the more science probes this nature of reality, the more scientists who do not hesitate to move behind this Aristotelian frame. These scientists affirm that there is something more. In quantum physics, for the past 50 years at least, has been talking about the unified field in which all the phenomena that we perceive are particular vibrations or wave patterns. Something that is taking place in that field, but it’s not itself the field, but is the reflection of the field.
I realized that this makes a lot of sense. That you cannot deny the existence of such a deeper dimension. And it seemed to me always most rationally and intuitively right. When I looked, I saw that there is indeed an idea that has been around for three and half dozen years in the great classic metaphysics. And to the thinking of the Hindu seers of India who were speaking about a dimension which is the origin and the source of all the perceivable dimensions, the perceivable dimensions, earth, air, water, fire. These are what we see in the world.
What this deeper dimension is is not something that we see, but which in a way reflects or gives rise to the perceivable world. Very beautiful work by the great yogi, describes this, we call the Akashic dimension. Describes this in great detail, and relates the classical thinking also to modern science. Actually, I did that. Relating more, going into quantum physics.
And I came to the conclusion that if you take insights, and you substitute the word Akasha to quantum field, you get quantum science practically, because they’re talking about the same thing, just phrased differently. If I perceive, I believe that the deeper dimension exists. The deeper dimension is not something we perceive is our sensory organs, but it is there, and it is the source of all things.
David calls it the implicate order. Obviously, the explicate order is a manifestation. I begin to think in these germs, and say that this deeper dimension can be called, of course can be called a unified dimension, can be called the integral implicate order. We can give all the names that we wish. But to give credit, to give credit to these mystical philosophers of India, and we can call them, call this the Akasha dimension.
And to bring it up to date, I talk about the Akashic Field, because field is something for me is how the world is presented to us, which presented sequentially. One thing after another. Was assume is there many dimension, or three dimensions we seem to perceive, but there is a fourth dimension according to the theory. Quantum theories talk about up to 33 dimensions. Certainly more than a single dimension. And this is how it’s presented to us. All these dimensions is in a continuous field, an unbroken and seamless field. And so, this deep dimension is presented to us as an Akasha domain, as an Akashic Field.
This is just to answer your question. Just to add to one thing, when I started calling this in my writings this unified field, the grand unified field as other scientists are saying, if I started calling it the Akashic Field, the reaction was spontaneous and very, very surprising. [inaudible 00:11:01] “Yes, we know about the Akashic Field.” Most people heard about the Akashic records, for example. And they said, “Yes, this makes sense that the grand unified field of quantum science is actually an Akashic Field.” So, let it be, and I started working with this concept, and people found it meaningful.
That’s where it is. That’s why then after having written a book I believe in 2007 or so, the first time, no, 2004, the first edition of Science and the Akashic Field, it really did well in Amazon and elsewhere. And so, people started asking, well, can I say something more about what I believe about the Akashic Field now? I proposed this to my publisher, says, “Yes, by all means, explain that.” So I said, “Let’s do it in terms of loss. In terms of what there is specifically about this field. What it is that is not changeable. What really fundamental about this field.”
Because the everyday field, the everyday world is constantly changing. But it must change according to some rules, otherwise it will be random chance, haphazard. They couldn’t make sense. They had that. But if there is a logic behind it, and some laws that regulate the change.
It’s like playing chess, there’s some laws of chess which are not changeable. The games are. Every game is a different game, every player is a different player, but the laws are the same. The same way. We are all different. Our world as we perceive is changing all the time. But behind the change, we can perceive some regularity, some loss. And I tied in this little book to describe what I consider would be the most fundamental, basic laws of what you can call the Akashic Field.
Rob Johnson:
Perhaps we could take a brief tour through the three laws in the first part of your book, connectivity law, the memory law, and the coherence law. Can you share with our listeners briefly what each of those represents?
Ervin Laszlo:
These are short term. These are just labels that I think are useful to identify these laws. The connectivity law, it really means that what you now see on the business of experiments in the 1980s. New quantum physics that at the fundamental level of reality, things are so connected that what happens in one place is reflected in another place. Doesn’t just affect the other place, but seems to happen also there. [inaudible 00:13:59] and the more experimental, non-locality in quantum physics.
It’s not that one thing affects another. What happens here is also happening there. It’s the same event is taking place, even though things are seemingly separate from one another. Turns out that they are not. They remain connected. Once they are connected, they remain connected.
Based on that, more and more experiments were made to see how things truly are replicated over distance. How we can transcend distance. And also, the more and more interestingly, how we can transcend time. Because what happened some time ago, if you do it again, it’s as if it will be happening now. Time doesn’t have the same meaning as universe. It’s a sequence of events. And space.
Ervin Laszlo:
These are the connectivities that come to light in contemporary science. They seem to occur at the micro level. And for a long time, people said that all it concerns the micro level. Once you are on the macro level, there are these so-called motions of molecules, which means that the probability is canceling out, and we deal with a standard, new universe.
Not quite true. More and more experiments now show that on the macro level, or the level that we observe, as opposed to the micro level which you don’t observe. This is so small. But on the ordinary macro level also, things are connected in some surprising ways. Coincidences are not really coincidences. They are connections in some way. Sometimes they are because they don’t have explanation in terms of Newtonian loss, mechanistic loss, but they occur anyway, and they occur seemingly in a deep dimension. They occur in this field. They manifest in the field of everyday experience, but they occur deep down.
This might seem like splitting hairs, but think of it, how fundamental this idea is, that the world is that we observe, that we live in is really a manifestation, an exhibition of something which is rooted deeper in the universe, which is present in the universe, where everything. And then, we can get to the next after that almost. Because then in this field, everything remains what it is. Nothing vanishes in time.
Connection, yes. That was the first law. I believe the second law, as you have seen, is the law of memory, of remaining. To continue this thought, and a few words, whatever happens in this universe, in space and time, may seem to disappear afterward, vanish, be canceled, as it were, but you can no more cancel an event from the Akashic Field than you could cancel an input from your computer, if your computer is turned on to record what you’re doing. It’s all there.
The Akashic Field is a memory field. We can now understand how memories can encompass a lot of events. I have been told that holograms can store an incredible amount of information. One example, the claim is that a hologram the size of a cube of sugar, which is a multi-dimension, a multilayer hologram, if that hologram could store as much information as to locate every letter in every word, in every volume in the Library of Congress. It’s almost mind boggling the level of information. And it’s all done on a size, and a hologram the size of a cube of sugar.
Now, imagine about the universe as a whole system can store. It can store everything from the very beginning of space and time. And the Big Bang. It’s all there. We can all replay it back. It all can be recalled, because it’s all conserved. This is a cosmic memory. Talk about the Akashic records, it’s not only a record of individuals of human beings, and of what is happening to humans, it’s a record of the universe, of the evolution of the universe.
I believe that is fairly established in science. It’s unlikely that we should come across that’s contrary to it. All things are connected, and all things are conserved. These are the first two laws.
Rob Johnson:
And then, the coherence law. How does that relate to the other two, and what else does it illuminate?
Ervin Laszlo:
Well, the background to that is, just to reach back for a moment, it used to be a dogma almost, a doctrine, a central doctrine of science. And there is no higher guidance in the world in what happens. That there are scientists who are bringing in teleology, bringing in some God-like, transcendent figure who’s will would prevail, and who would see what is to happen, and how things are to happen.
They were refusing this, and so the dogma became that the universe, what we perceive of the universe, is the result of a series of chance interactions. A lot of things are happening by chance, they interact, and sooner or later the universe emerges. It’s like the saying if you allow a monkey to play on the keys of a typewriter, given sufficient time, he’ll type out the sonnets of Shakespeare. I suppose it would take some while, but in principle, statistically, the possibility, it is given that all permutations of possibilities occur if not sooner than later, given enough time.
Now, the universe has finite time to what it is today. According to the current understanding, which is now what? 50, 60 years at least, if not more. That the processes that we call evolution that are ongoing in this universe have not been there forever. They have started, and they will end also. They have started it’s generally believed at the singularity in the cosmos, which we call the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. And they’ll run until they either run down in a vacuum in space, or they get compressed again in so-called big crunch. All the matter-like particles in the world, in the universe get compressed again to the size of a quantum, size smaller than head of a pin.
This is a finite process. It has a beginning, has an end. And in the mean time, it proceeds in certain ways. And if you proceed randomly, everything will be just a matter of chance, it’s very, very unlikely, statistically extremely unlikely, that it will create a coherent universe. There would be a lot of events, a lot of chaos, a lot of different fluctuations occurring. Maybe some patterns would emerge on this amazingly coherent universe.
Now, we can have laws describing what is happening. Maybe can make sense of events relating, one event relating to another. This universe would not have emerged. They say even the DNA of a fruit fly would not have emerged by random mixing in the time of 13.8 billion years ago. The universe is very, very complex.
Just to give another example, Fred Hoyle, great mathematical physicist, gave an example about the Rubik cube. You know the Rubik cube where this six-sided cube that you can twist it. There’s different colors. If you start in any random combinations, it’ll be. And if you think one second, where each move to unscramble it, to be sure that you’ve unscrambled it, then you must all the permutations. And if you take one second per possible permutation, total time requires the longer than the age of the universe.
Even the Rubik cube is complex. Is a highly complex entity. Allowing so many different permutations, different changes. And of course even more so a living system, enormously complex. Also, the stellar systems, the cosmic systems.
Let’s not underestimate it. It’s not likely, in fact, astronomically improbable, that it all by random mixing. Maybe something in the universe, a drive, a movement, and a director I call it, which is stored coherence. That means store the organizing of the chaos into recognizable sequences. In a coherent system, every element is connected with every other. Every element responses to every other. And all the elements together created a system that emerges. A living system is created because all the elements the organism, all the elements work together to maintain that system.
If some elements would fail to work together, it’ll become a disease. We have to recognize that there is a drive, there is a tropism, or to make it more acceptable to scientific mentality, and attractor, which is built into this universe, which was there already at the Big Bang. Because all indications reconstructed show that the laws of nature are not created in the Big Bang, they are governing the processes that have unfolded since the Big Bang. And they were probably there in potential.
What are these laws, these immutable laws? They are really what is given to the. Given by whom? Given by what? A transcendental entity, a transcendental force, or something certainly that is beyond this universe. It’s beyond the explicate order, it’s beyond the observable world, but not necessarily beyond the world itself. Because this world has a deeper dimension, and the loss is immutable loss. Could be given in the Akasha dimension.
That’s why I say yes, the drive toward coherence, the tropism for creating integral systems of multiple diverse parts that are integrated in such a way that they maintain the system against all loss of probability, because physical systems tend to run down as loss of entropy. Run down to chaos. But nevertheless, the university itself doesn’t seem to run down, nor does the sphere of life run down. Elements, but tt seems to me that there is a very deep seated, basic law with the universe. This is a tropism towards coherence, towards I’ve called it the whole tropic law, the whole tropic principle.
Rob Johnson:
I remember as I first read this book, I received a shutter when I read something that you said. “Things to be observed in a sea of potentiality that are fished out from this sea by our observation, our observation actualizes them.” That made me shutter because I recently read a book by a poet called IN-Q, which stands short for in question. And he said, “People will find evidence to support what they want to believe. And the notion that they want to believe something, and they hunt for what you might call a subset of what is out there, and then ‘capture that as an observation’, it’s almost like the what you might call the premise of science is in reverse.”
And you’re asking us to open to a much broader what you might call sensitivity and awareness, and perhaps perceive many things that we find to be uncomfortable. When I went through the book, there were parts on hallucinogenic experience, meditation, and others as ways of getting to this deeper and better place.
But I also was struck by your reference to a values researcher named Karen Miller. And I’ll just briefly, there were 10, I believe, values that you sited, unity, community, life, freedom, connection, sustainability, creativity, empowerment, choice, and integrity. And how we bring those values to the surface, and become our most curious, humble, sensitive, enlightened self, combining spirituality and science seems to be of greater service to humankind as a potential than the traditional way. As you I said, I believe you said earlier in the book, “When we view everything as material or it doesn’t exist, we’re missing a whole lot of the signals that are being sent to us.”
But let’s talk how these 10 values, and how this framework that the Akashic Field and its immutable laws can help us turn the corner, and overcome the obstacles that keep our scientific community from a higher awareness, and perhaps threaten our existence on earth.
Ervin Laszlo:
Thank you for this very, very basic question. I can, in a way, distill down to a singular value, which is encouragement. It’s prompted from this idea that evolves, are coherent. And this single value would be to value integrality within diversity. This is the first to what emerges in the field, but emerges are integral and diverse entities, systems.
Think of the human body. Think of any living body. Think of the solar system, think of the galaxies. Whatever level you take, things are not all the same. If they were, they would not be systems, they would be heaps. They would not have a capacity to survive this constant turmoil, which goes on in this deep, field.
What survives, what exists is a coherent set of fluctuations to go down to. But in the human world, what appears survives is living entities, entire ecologists, and then ultimately the whole web of life. These are systems, whole systems. Each one of them in its own way. At the same time, they’re also parts, because they’re parts in larger systems. The largest relevant system is the fly on the planet. Immediately relevant.
The largest system altogether, it would be the universe as a whole obviously. But within that, what counts for us is life with a capital L on this planet. And that system has a great deal of diversity. We have destroyed unfortunately much of its diversity. And it has a great deal of unity. We also destroyed much of this unity. Because it can only exist if every part compliments every other part.
Yes, there is competition. Yes, there is seemingly violence as well. But nothing is arbitrary. Nothing is just reason. Everything contributes to the maintaining of the overall system. We try to maintain it as smoothly, and as freely of violence, and arbitrary acts as possible. But the whole system is maintained by finding how one thing leads to another, not just passively like a jigsaw puzzle, but how its as a dynamic entity, as a sophisticated engine that takes us some place.
Every part has to work perfectly as a satellite, robot, a rocket engine that takes us up to space, everything has to run perfectly to get it exactly into right orbit. The whole university is flying towards some higher levels of coherence. Moving to that direction. Whatever contributes to it is a value. Whatever halts and detracts from it makes an obstacle this value.
This is a very simple rule of thumb, is what you are talking about, is what you are thinking, what you are behaving, what you’re acting like, is that compatible with the evolution? Is it, first of all, the persistence, and then the thriving, and the evolution of life on the planet.
Seems a lot of far-fetched question. But we see if you don’t take it into account how this planetary ecology can create conditions that could be threatening and are threatening the human existence in the world, we need a coherent overall system. And enough just to fix up one part to work for us if the other parts don’t come along.
We need to return to thinking in holistic terms, in terms of whole systems. And the value is ultimately the value of coherence in a diverse system. Summed it up after many, many other explanations, and experiences, and explorations, I would sum it up like that.
The simpler, most fundamental value is to find coherence integrality, integrity within that whole system. Not making it uniform, not making it flat. Not necessarily more powerful, but making it well organized, well functioning. Principle that he himself maintained, also his followers, they’re all in this. He said, “Not only, but survives is the fittest.” He says, “What survives is the most cooperative.
And today, the new biologist that is the case. I suppose the new psychology also comes to this insight. We are healthy in mind, in body and in mind, and we are one with the world around us. And we cooperate, and we are part of a movement towards higher levels of coherence and integration in this world. You can feel this. If you’re open to this, you can feel that you can be like that. You can also feel when you’re being an obstacle to it.
I think the new ethics is a natural Is a system-like ethic, a holistic ethic. Takes the whole system as the point of. That’s the criteria. The health of the body is a criteria for the health of every organ and every cell in the body. The health of the is a criteria for every human being and human organization on this planet. That makes sense to me, and I think in releasing that, that your body’s problems, in large part actually, are because we have forgotten this, and we are all looking at how we can optimize the working of a part as you’re taking it into account what this does for the rest of the system.
Rob Johnson:
Well, sir, I am sitting here recalling reading your autobiography where you started as a musician. And I feel like I’m listening both to a composer and a conductor at the same time. The energy that my young scholars and our audience can experience at a time when, as you say in the book, it’s not a time of health or ease, it’s a time perhaps of dis-ease.
And you, as an example, are rising to the challenge with an unrelenting energy. The number of books that you’ve released in the last two years is a call to action, to all of us to join you. Your courage into helping us evolve beyond structures, vested interests, and conditions which are no longer suitable is an example for every young scholar in this world striking out to do what I believe you do, which is work from your mind and your heart for the global common good. Thank you for joining me today, and thank you for the work that you do.
Ervin Laszlo:
Thank you for this. Much, much appreciated words. It’s a pleasure to talk with you about this. It’s very important that we discuss them. And whether you like my example or not, everybody can decide it. But the fact is that we do have to recognize that we have a common aim to survive together, to flourish together. And that that is the utmost objective that we can pursue in a time of transformation and crisis. We have an opportunity for this. We’re doing this. Let’s use this opportunity.
Rob Johnson:
And I look forward, as I mentioned at the outset, to how you will integrate in your forthcoming book on the wisdom principles. And that book I believe in the United States will be released in September. And you can be sure I’ll call you back to make another session, and add that dimension into the conversations we’ve had here this week.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you again, and I look forward to following your work, following your example, and speaking with you again.
Ervin Laszlo:
Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
