Bohm’s Implicate Order, Wheeler’s Participatory Universe, Stapp’s Mindful Universe, Zurek’s Quantum Darwinism and the Buddhist Mind-Only Ground Consciousness

Abstract

The fundamental Buddhist definition of consciousness is ‘clarity that cognizes.’ This primordial nature is an essentially unified field of clarity, or emptiness, which is not the same as nothingness but, rather can be conceived of as a field of potential experience, which has the core function of perception or cognition. Because of this fundamental nature there is an inner tension at the heart of reality. The fundamental nature of awareness-consciousness is undivided (jnana) but its function is cognition, and cognition is a process which involves duality. This is why nondual awareness-wisdom (jnana) spontaneously divides itself into dualistic appearances in the illusory divided realm of dualistic consciousness (vijnana). The prefix ‘vi’ indicates a cut or division; cognition cannot take place without a rift, a division, in the basic nature of the fundamental awareness (jnana). Within this paradoxical nature of the self-perceiving ground of reality lies the solution to the riddle of existence. And within the mechanism of ‘quantum karma’ lies the understanding of the process of experiential dualistic seeming reality which really is just a cycle of endless perception, giving rise to manifestation, driven by the universe’s ‘craving’ to perceive its own nature.