My View of the World: Erwin Schrödinger

A couple of quotes from the fascinating book by the Physicist: "Where riddles led me on to further riddles, To them the truth was quite precisely known." 1. “What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same? Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, 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; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world'. 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. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end." 2. “No Self Stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and-as a special class within the whole-mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any of its somatic, especially its cerebral, system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life by a newly shaped environment…by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all of that, but rather in the strictest sense of the word, THE SAME THING as all that: the strict direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty. It is rather remarkable that whereas western philosophy has almost universally accepted the idea that the death of the individual does not put an end to anything that is of the essence of life, it has (with the exception of Plato and Schopenhauer) bestowed hardly a thought on this other idea, much deeper and more intimately joyful, which logically goes almost hand in hand with it: the idea that the same thing applies to individual birth, at which what happens is not that I am created for the first time but that I slowly awaken as though from a deep sleep. Then I can see my hopes and strivings, my fears and cares as the same as those of thousands who have lived before me, and I may hope that future centuries may bring fulfilment to my yearnings of centuries ago. No seed of thought can germinate in me except as the continuation of some forbear; not really a new seed but the predetermined unfolding of a bud on the ancient, sacred tree of life." Part II coming soon.