Erwin had been particularly impressed by some words of Jung, which he would later quote in his Tarner lectures on Mind and Matter:
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All science, however, is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles,it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non- existence.
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This is confirmed to a great extent by Burnet’s description of the scientific attitude as ‘thinking about the world in a Greek way’, and to its being based on two assumptions: the confident belief that natural events can be understood and explained, but that this can only be done by an objective observation of phenomena, with the perceiving subject relegated to the role of a mere external observer.
As he was developing these ideas, Erwin wrote a long essay in the late Autumn of 1947, On the characteristics of the world view of science, which he sent to an Austrian Journal, describing it ‘as a sort of intellectual present to a liberated Austria.’ In it he uses a striking example to make the same point by referring to Edgar Allen Poe’s story, ‘The Mask of the Red Death’, in which a daring reveller tears off the mask and cloak from the dread figure, but finds nothing beneath them. In the same way, Schrödinger points out, our perceiving and thinking self is not to be found in the world picture of science, because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and thus cannot be found in any part of the witnessed.
But if this is so then, how are we to explain the apparent multiplicity of selves? Not, he suggests, by the ‘horrible doctrine of monads due to Leibnitz, each imprisoned in a world of its own, without windows, in agreement only through a pre-established cosmic harmony,’ but by the only alternative, that there is only one consciousness. One powerful evidence of the unification of consciousness is that it is never experienced in the plural.
Erwin points out further that the mystical experience of union with God regularly leads to this understanding, and he quotes the words of a Persian mystic poet Aziz Nasafi:
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The world of spirits is a single spirit standing like a light at the back of the world of bodies and shining through each individual that comes into existence as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, more or less light penetrates into the world. But the light always remains the same.
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In the Vedantic literature, we find other illustrations of the same universality. For instance, in the fourteenth century Vedantic classic, Panchadashi, the individual consciousness is likened to the space in a large number of pots, which is apparently circumscribed and isolated within each pot, but is really one with the whole of space. This can be seen clearly when the pots are destroyed and the space within them remains unchanged as part of the universal space, of which it was always a part.
As Moore writes:
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From his time as a young man, cold and hungry in wartime Vienna, when he delved deep into the Upanishads, through his years of great scientific accomplishment, to his situation as a philosopher on the verge of old age, Schrödinger had never deviated from a religious understanding of our mysterious world. His position was captured in a remarkable painting by his Dublin colleague, John Synge,... which shows Erwin held in the hand of God as he ponders the equations of the unified field theory.
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Nonetheless, his understanding and appreciation of the Advaita Vedanta of Shri Shankara was still only an intellectual understanding, and not the self-realization which is promised to the true seeker...
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