ABSTRACT
Our individual consciousnesses are like drops of water taken from an ocean: each drop is a unique individual drop, with its own particular qualities and identity; yet each drop is also of the same essence as the ocean–water. The experience of unity can be seen to form the core of all mystical and religious traditions. On the surface, the various religions might appear to offer very different teachings about the nature of reality and the means towards achieving salvation or liberation. The writer and novelist Aldous Huxley, who studied the the major religious and mystical traditions in considerable depth, referred to this basic teaching as the Perennial Philosophy. David Bohm’s theory of implicate order suggests that the physical Universe may be like a hologram, with the whole of space and time somehow encoded in every part of it. The physicist is probing the deepest levels of objective existence using the tools of physical experimentation, reason and mathematics.
